He told me (for the second time) that her
husband had deserted her two years ago. “No problem there,” he said
obscurely. She lived all alone except when her son came for money,
four or five times a year and stayed a few days each time. We had
to map out the future strategy with her even if the immediate
problem was to test the sensors in our own living room. Then I’d
have to convince her to let us set up the sensors in her living
room.
Before I could come up with a wisecrack to
disarm my disquiet he went on.
Her junky son was a real problem though.
It was a word I didn’t like. The problem was
that, then. I knew there were easier ones. Harvey explained the
focus of the problem.
“Smashes things when he. Runs out of dope.
Suppose he smashed the sensors? Unless he has an overdose. Before
we set them up.”
He sounded hopeful. I’d said nothing. He
couldn’t know. But it wasn’t a thing to say to anyone. I changed
the subject and started talking about his “time machine.” He didn’t
like the term. So far he’d discouraged all talk about his
apparatus. With his vocal-cord problems it was easy for him to
leave unwelcome questions unanswered. He avoided even the general
subject of time-travel. He was pathologically suspicious, even of
me, I sometimes thought. I tried again.
Was that all it could do? Just give you poor
flickering images without sound or color and capture old radio
programs? I’d thought a time machine could transport you back and
forth. I recalled H. G. Wells’ novel, no theoretical difficulties:
a kind of nickel-plated bicycle with strategic crystals and the
time-traveler zipped forward and back at will along the
“time-continuum,” from dinosaurs to the death of the planet, saving
a nubile girl on the way.
He said that chronoportation – what I called
“time-travel” – was an impossibility, at least for objects of
anything but minimal mass. A microbe maybe but not a man. And even
this exception wasn’t sure.
Then you couldn’t go back in the past? He
replied, “Mentally it might be possible.” Did he mean memory? I
asked. You didn’t need a machine for that. No, not memory, he said,
scowling. Something else. He clammed up. “You wouldn’t understand.
You haven’t got the mathematical basis,” he said.
I felt the old inferiority. To prove I knew a
little of what was involved I trotted out the scraps I’d picked up
from Wells and the gaudy-covered SF pulp magazines of the 40s. I
said that in a sense whatever we see is the past and cited the
example of the galaxy Andromeda. To see the two of us chatting here
in this ex-garden right now, inhabitants of Andromeda would have to
wait a million years.
“Two point two million,” he corrected.
“Andromeda is roughly. Two point two million. Light years
away.”
With the correction I remembered that he was
the one who had told me the Andromeda business in the first place,
long, long ago. To cover my confusion I gulped down the whisky in
my glass and poured out more. At an advanced age I was parroting
what he had said at the age of thirteen and was getting it
wrong.
Forgetting he’d just told me that
chronoportation was impossible I asked him about travel to the
future rather than to the past. Did we really want to go back and
live that sinister mess, collective and personal, all over again,
without the power to change the course of things? Did we really
want even to witness it? The history of mankind had its ups and
downs. Couldn’t he, Harvey, pinpoint one of the heights in the
future, something pastoral but hygienic, and whisk us there, to a
golden green time where people got on together, where they could
heal what was ailing us in soul and body, no alimony, no time
erosions, where you lived hale to the age of Methuselah or beyond?
Or forever, why not forever? Something like a
walking-over-God’s-heaven time, gonna meet my mother there, ain’t
gonna study war no more, except it would be on earth. Couldn’t that
be done?
He shook his head. He said the future was
purely conceptual. It had no reality. “That’s your pulp-magazines
again. The future doesn’t exist.”
I didn’t put up much of a struggle. He didn’t
have to knock himself out to convince me. For decades I’d been
believing in no future and now I had scientific confirmation.
A week later in the middle of the night a
smashing of glass and cries woke me up. I thought it came from
downstairs. I shoved my bare feet into my shoes, grabbed my
bathrobe and struggled into it while pounding down the stairs into
the living room. Hanna was still in front of the TV watching a
low-cut girl in a crypt full of coffins. “What is it?” I yelled
above the loud scary music. “What’s what?” she said, not taking her
eyes off the screen. I imagined that with the TV screams she hadn’t
heard the real ones. “That, for Christ’s sake!” I repeated as
another cry came: “Ohhh…”
“Oh that. That’s the junky again. The
Anderson kid. Nobody pays attention to that any more.”
There were more cries, clearer now. It wasn’t
“Ohhh” but a long denial: ‘Nooo…” I ran out of the house holding
the front of my pajama-bottoms bunched up. The waistband elastic
had lost its tight embrace. The gate was locked. I had to pound up
the stairs again and get the key and pound down again. Hanna didn’t
even look at me. I slammed the front door shut on the end of the
trailing bathrobe belt and lost it.
None of the other neighboring houses had
budged out of their cowardly darkness. The only light came from the
Anderson living-room picture window. It was still intact. It
illuminated them both on the driveway. Her son was tall and thin,
blond like his mother. He was wearing high-heeled cowboy boots,
ragged blue jeans and a sweatshirt. With an abstracted expression
he was smashing holes in the windshield of her old Chevrolet with a
hammer that must have weighed five pounds. The door-windows were
already gone. The glass-crumbs glittered on the driveway gravel
like diamonds.
She was sitting hunched and swaying in the
middle of the driveway, head lowered, knees drawn up. She was in
her nightgown with a lumber jacket thrown over her shoulders.
Puffing badly I edged up to her.
“Have you called the police? Do you want me
to call the police?”
She didn’t respond. She went on swaying. Her
eyes were squeezed shut and her expression was intense, almost
ecstatic. It was crazy, given the circumstances.
Now he lost interest in the car. All of the
glass was gone by now. He moved unsteadily toward her. I retreated.
He stood over her with the hammer dangling by his side and asked
over and over if she was going to give him the money. She didn’t
respond to him either, went on swaying with shut eyes. I think he
kicked her or tried to and almost flopped on his face. I just stood
there looking on in my bathrobe and defective pajamas. For some
reason he started for the long strip of garden where she’d planted
the tulips.
Without raising a finger I’d watched him
demolishing the car and threatening his mother. Now I was moving
forward with the spade I found leaning against the house, yelling
at him, heading him off from the flowerbed. Keith hadn’t been that
way. He’d never done violence to us or to things, only, finally, to
himself.
Beth Anderson’s son stopped in his tracks and
stared at me in stupor. He raised the hammer. I thought he was
going to hurl it at my head. He moved forward. I backed off,
jabbing at him with the spade, not touching him at all, just to
keep him away from me. I needed both hands for the job and in the
wind my beltless bathrobe yawned wide and the pajama-bottoms with
the tired elastic began slipping.
I was badly frightened. I could imagine my
forehead shattering like the windshield. I heard Beth Anderson
crying out, “No! No!” and heard the fast crunch of the gravel.
She’d snapped out of it. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her
running to my rescue and then I was slammed breathless and found
myself flying. The ground came up and hit me and I sprawled
full-length belly-down in the flowerbed, the wind knocked out of
me, my pajama-bottoms around my ankles.
She’d done it.
To me.
Done it deliberately, to me, shoved me all
her might. I had the taste and grit of cold muddy earth in my
mouth. Muddy because that evening she’d watered her forget-me-nots,
oh I would not forget. Maybe he was hovering over me, the hammer
uplifted. But I was stunned and couldn’t move. Maybe what really
paralyzed me was outrage.
“Ricky, are you all right, Ricky?” she was
gasping when I was able to get up, adjust my pajama-bottoms and
run. I’d just cleared her open gate when I heard a long wail: “Oh
my God, Jerry, Professor, Professor Weizman!” I ran faster.
Hanna was still looking at the horror picture
when I staggered back in. She grinned a malicious slovenly grin
when she saw me. I stammered out of earthen lips that she’d done
it, she’d attacked me, the two of them ganging up on me. I must
have been mentally unsettled to have unburdened myself to her.
Hanna stared at me and her cheeks started puffing. She burst out
laughing. The laughter built up in volume like Harvey’s machine.
I’d never heard such howls, such shrieks of laughter.
“Shut your face, you fat bitch,” I yelled out
of my immense humiliation. It was language I’d never used to a
woman at whatever provocation and some of these had been great. I
thumped upstairs, tracking additional dirt behind me on Hanna’s
runner.
She must have immediately reported the event
to Harvey down in his cellar. He came up, panting, just as I
emerged from the shower. He made a playful sub-navel grab and
congratulated me pointedly on my physical shape. He thought it
would be a good idea if I gave her a ring and offered to drive her
to work tomorrow morning. She worked part-time at a florists’. In
her own car she wouldn’t be able to.
“
Buy me a chauffeur’s cap,” I said. “I was
trying to protect her, her car at least, no, her
tulips
it was I was trying to protect,
not even up yet, when he comes after me with a hammer to brain me
and she attacks me. Me she attacks. Oh yes, I’ll drive her to work.
And back too. Call me James.”
“Women,” he croaked idiotically in
consolation. Why “women”? What did that explain? It was the first
time a woman had ever done such a thing to me, knocked me down and
me in a posture of succor. Metaphorically, plenty of times, but
never in the flesh.
At nine-thirty next morning the phone rang.
Hanna said it was for me. Harvey was standing by expectantly as if
he knew who was calling. Later I wondered if she hadn’t already
phoned while I was sleeping. Harvey switched on the speaker. It
came out non-stop with just quick gasps for breath:
“Oh, Professor Weizman, you are all right,
aren’t you? I can’t tell you how ashamed I am for last night. I
didn’t recognize you. I was trying the Golden Galaxy technique,
trying to blank out everything, and all of a sudden I was back and
I saw somebody in a bathrobe in my tulip bed with a spade trying to
kill my defenseless Ricky was what I thought. He wouldn’t hurt a
fly, not even in self-defense. I know you were doing it for me. I
know that now and I thank you, I thank you. But I didn’t know that
then. I didn’t recognize you until after that awful, awful thing I
did. Oh Professor Weizman, I’m so ashamed, I thought of you all
night long. I beg of you to forgive me.”
She had these quaint lacy expressions like,
“If I may” and “I beg of you”, but a powerful shove for such a
dainty woman.
I said: nothing to forgive, it was all my
fault, interfering in a family quarrel. I had got what I deserved.
Actually it was quite funny, I said (thinking of the collapsing
pajama-bottoms) if you regarded the incident from another angle, as
I would probably be trying to do in a week or two.
“Oh sir, it’s not funny, oh it’s anything but
funny, not funny, not funny at all.”
She started crying. I got it in both ears, in
the receiver and over the speaker. Harvey jabbed me in the ribs and
mimed an expression of infinite pity.
So I, treacherously laid low in earth like a
tulip-bulb at 2:30 am, found myself a few hours later turning the
other mud-stained cheek, comforting my attacker, perfunctorily, OK,
but comforting her. Sometimes I wonder if I’m not basically a weak
person, as my first wife used to say, with increasing frequency in
the final years.
That wasn’t the end to it.
“Flowers for you, Perfessor,” said Hanna, a
few hours later, with her slovenly grin, shoving a bouquet of red
roses at me. It wasn’t her offering even though her attitude toward
me had improved greatly following the night’s excitement when I’d
twice descended from my professorial heights, first by coming back
a mud statue and second by calling her a bitch.
They were rigid long-stemmed scentless roses,
like frigid countesses. They must have come from her florist-shop.
With, I guessed, a 40% discount for employees. A nasty rancorous
thought. There was a card with Mrs Beth Anderson embossed in lower
middle-class gothic script and a single sentence in violet ink:
To Professor Weizman with the
humblest and sincerest of apologies
.
Later Harvey came up for air and saw the
flowers.
“
She
sends
you
flowers? That’s good. That’s very good.”
Some time after we looked out of the window and saw
her standing by the hurricane fence, busy in her strip of flowerbed
despite the drizzle. She was wearing a gleaming yellow raincoat and
fisherman’s hat. Aren’t you going to thank her? he wanted to know,
meaning for the roses. He kept pestering me.
What could I do, with the woman pulling and
Harvey pushing? It was still drizzling and the deck chair was
dripping but leaving the house I instinctively grabbed the bottle
and the book as though going out in the rain wasn’t for her. I
apprehended more tears but she came up to the fence, looking
terrible but self-composed, and spoke of the weather. I spoke of
New York winters. She spoke of a book she was reading. The rain
started coming down harder. I sneezed twice. She said I was
catching cold in the rain. I agreed and ran back to the house with
the book and the bottle. I hadn’t mentioned her roses. She hadn’t
mentioned her son.