The Genius and the Goddess Page 3

  I shook my head.

  “Well, as I was saying,” he resumed, “she started singing ‘If you were the only girl in the world,’ she changed the next line to ‘and I were the vermin fangs,’ then broke off, made a dive for Grampus, the cocker spaniel, who eluded her and rushed off, full tilt across the pasture, with Ruth in hot pursuit. I followed at a walk and, when at last I caught up with her, she was standing on a little knoll, with Grampus panting at her feet. The wind was blowing and she was facing into it, like a miniature Victory of Samothrace, the hair lifting from her small flushed face, her short skirt blown back and fluttering like a flag, the cotton of her blouse pressed by the air stream against a thin little body that was still almost as flat and boyish as Timmy’s. Her eyes were closed, her lips moved in some silent rhapsody or invocation. The dog turned his head as I approached and wagged a stumpy tail; but Ruth was too far gone into her rapture to hear me. It would have been almost a sacrilege to disturb her; so I halted a few yards away and quietly sat down on the grass. As I watched her, a beatific smile parted her lips and the whole face seemed to glow as though with an inner light. Suddenly her expression changed; she uttered a little cry, opened her eyes and looked about her with an air of frightened bewilderment. ‘John!’ she called thankfully, when she caught sight of me, then ran and dropped on her knees beside me. ‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ she said. ‘And there’s old Grampus. I almost thought…’ She broke off and, with the forefinger of her right hand, touched the tip of her nose, her lips, her chin. ‘Do I look the same?’ she asked. ‘The same,’ I assured her, ‘but if anything a little more so.’ She laughed, and it was a laugh not so much of amusement as of relief. ‘I was nearly gone,’ she confided. ‘Gone where?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘It was that wind. Blowing and blowing. Blowing everything out of my head—you and Grampus and everyone else, everyone at home, everyone at school, and everything I ever knew or ever cared about. All blown away, and nothing left but the wind and the feeling of my being alive. And they were turning into the same thing and blowing away. And if I’d let go, there wouldn’t have been any stopping. I’d have crossed the mountains and gone out over the ocean and maybe right off into one of those black holes between the stars that we were looking at last night.’ She shuddered. ‘Do you think I would have died?’ she asked. ‘Or maybe gone into a catalepsy, so that they’d think I was dead, and then I’d have woken up in a coffin.’ She was back again with Edgar Allan Poe. Next day she showed me a lamentable piece of doggerel, in which the terrors of the night and the ecstasies of the morning had been reduced to the familiar glooms and tombs of all her rhyming. What a gulf between impression and expression! That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse—touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash.”

  “Aren’t you being unduly optimistic about experience?” I questioned. “Is it always so golden and poetical?”

  “Intrinsically golden,” Rivers insisted. “Poetical by its essential nature. But of course if you’re sufficiently steeped in the tripe and hogwash dished out by the molders of public opinion, you’ll tend automatically to pollute your impressions at the source; you’ll re-create the world in the image of your own notions—and of course your own notions are everybody else’s notions; so the world you live in will consist of the Lowest Common Denominators of the local culture. But the original poetry is always there—always,” he insisted.

  “Even for the old?”

  “Yes, even for the old. Provided, of course, that they can recapture their lost innocence.”

  “And do you ever succeed, may I ask?”

  “Believe it or not,” Rivers answered, “I sometimes do. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that it sometimes happens to me. It happened yesterday, as a matter of fact, while I was playing with my grandson. From one minute to another—the transformation of lead into gold, of solemn professorial hogwash into poetry, the kind of poetry that life was all the time while I was with the Maartenses. Every moment of it.”

  “Including the moments in the laboratory?”

  “Those were some of the best moments,” he answered me. “Moments of paper work, moments of fiddling around with experimental gadgets, moments of discussion and argument. The whole thing was pure idyllic poetry, like something out of Theocritus or Vergil. Four young Ph.D.’s in the role of goatherd’s apprentices, with Henry as the patriarch, teaching the youngsters the tricks of his trade, dropping pearls of wisdom, spinning interminable yarns about the new pantheon of theoretical physics. He struck the lyre and rhapsodized about the metamorphosis of earth-bound Mass into celestial Energy. He sang the hopeless loves of Electron for her Nucleus. He piped of Quanta and hinted darkly at the mysteries of Indeterminacy. It was idyllic. Those were the days, remember, when you could be a physicist without feeling guilty; the days when it was still possible to believe that you were working for the greater glory of God. Now they won’t even allow you the comfort of self-deception. You’re paid by the Navy and trailed by the FBI. Not for one moment do they permit you to forget what you’re up to. Ad majorem Dei gloriam? Don’t be an idiot! Ad majorem hominis degradationem—that’s the thing you’re working for. But in 1921 infernal machines were safely in the future. In 1921 we were just a bunch of Theocritean innocents, enjoying the nicest kind of clean scientific fun. And when the fun in the laboratory was over, I’d drive Henry home in the Maxwell and there’d be fun of another kind. Sometimes it was young Timmy, having difficulties with the Rule of Three. Sometimes it was Ruth who simply couldn’t see why the square on the hypotenuse must always be equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. In this case, yes; she was ready to admit it. But why every time? They would appeal to their father. But Henry had lived so long in the world of Higher Mathematics that he had forgotten how to do sums; and he was interested in Euclid only because Euclid’s was the classical example of reasoning based upon a vicious circle. After a few minutes of utterly confounding talk, the great man would get bored and quietly fade away, leaving me to solve Timmy’s problem by some method a little simpler than vector analysis, to set Ruth’s doubts at rest by arguments a little less subversive of all faith in rationality than Hilbert’s or Poincaré’s. And then at supper there would be the noisy fun of the children telling their mother about the day’s events at school; the sacrilegious fun of Katy suddenly breaking into a soliloquy on general relativity theory with an accusing question about those flannel pants which Henry was supposed to have picked up at the cleaners; the Old Plantation fun of Beulah’s comments on the conversation, or the epic fun of one of her sustained, blow-by-blow accounts of how they used to butcher hogs back on the farm. And later, when the children had gone to bed and Henry had shut himself up in his study, there was the fun of funs—there were my evenings with Katy.”

  Rivers leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

  “I’m not much good at visualizing,” he said after a little silence. “But the wallpaper, I’m pretty sure, was a dusty kind of pink. And the lampshade was certainly red. It must have been red, because there was always that rich flush on her face, as she sat there darning our socks or sewing on the children’s buttons. A flush on the face, but never on the hands. The hands moved in the brightness of the unscreened light. What strong hands!” he added, smiling to himself. “What efficient hands! None of your spiritual, Blessed-Damozelish appendages! Honest-to-God hands that were good with screwdrivers; hands that could fix things when they went wrong; hands that could give a massage, or when necessary, a spanking; hands that had a genius for pastry and didn’t mind emptying slops. And the rest of her matched the hands. Her body—it was the body of a strong young matron. A matron with the face of a healthy peasant girl. No, that’s not quite right
. It was the face of a goddess disguised as a healthy peasant girl. Demeter, perhaps. No, Demeter was too sad. And it wasn’t Aphrodite either; there was nothing fatal or obsessive about Katy’s femininity, nothing self-consciously sexy. If there was a goddess involved, it must have been Hera. Hera playing the part of a milkmaid—but a milkmaid with a mind, a milkmaid who had gone to college.” Rivers opened his eyes and replaced the pipe between his teeth. He was still smiling. “I remember some of the things she said about the books I used to read aloud in the evenings. H. G. Wells, for example. He reminded her of the rice paddies in her native California. Acres and acres of shiny water, but never more than two inches deep. And those ladies and gentlemen in Henry James’s novels—could they ever bring themselves, she wondered, to go to the bathroom? And D. H. Lawrence. How she loved those early books of his! All scientists ought to be compelled to take a post-graduate course in Lawrence. She said that to the Chancellor when he came to dinner. He was a most distinguished chemist; and whether it was post hoc or propter hoc, I don’t know; but his wife looked as if all her secretions were pure acetic acid. Katy’s remarks weren’t at all well received.” Rivers chuckled. “And sometimes,” he went on, “we didn’t read; we just talked. Katy told me about her childhood in San Francisco. About the balls and parties after she came out. About the three young men who were in love with her—each one richer and, if possible, stupider than the last. At nineteen she got engaged to the richest and the dumbest. The trousseau was bought, the wedding presents had begun to arrive. And then Henry Maartens came out to Berkeley as a visiting professor. She heard him lecture on the philosophy of science, and after the lecture she went to an evening party given in his honor. They were introduced. He had a nose like an eagle’s, he had pale eyes like a Siamese cat’s, he looked like the portraits of Pascal, and when he laughed, the noise was like a ton of coke going down a chute. As for what he saw—it must have passed description. I knew Katy at thirty-six, when she was Hera. At nineteen she must have been Hebe and the three Graces and all the nymphs of Diana rolled into one. And Henry, remember, had just been divorced by his first wife. Poor woman! She simply wasn’t strong enough to play the parts assigned to her—mistress to an indefatigable lover, business manager to an absentee halfwit, secretary to a man of genius, and womb, placenta and circulatory system to the psychological equivalent of a fetus. After two miscarriages and a nervous breakdown, she had packed up and gone home to her mother. Henry was on the loose, all four of him—fetus, genius, half-wit and hungry lover—in search of some woman capable of meeting the demands of a symbiotic relationship, in which all the giving would be on her side, all the ravenous and infantile taking on his. The search had been going on for the best part of a year. Henry was growing desperate. And now, suddenly, providentially, here was Katy. It was love at first sight. He took her into a corner and, ignoring everyone else in the room, started to talk to her. Needless to say, it never occurred to him that she might have her own interests and problems; it never entered his head that it might perhaps be a good thing to draw the girl out. He just let fly at her with what happened, for the moment, to be on his mind. On this occasion, it was recent developments in logic. Katy, of course, didn’t understand a word of it; but he was so manifestly a genius, it was all so unspeakably wonderful, that there and then, before the evening was over, she made her mother ask him to dinner. He came, he finished off what he had to say and, while Mrs. Hanbury and her other guests played bridge, he plunged with Katy into semiotics. Three days later there was some sort of a picnic organized by the Audubon Society, and the two of them managed to get separated from the rest of the party in an arroyo. And finally there was the evening when they went to hear La Traviata. Rum-tum-tum-tum-te-tum.” Rivers hummed the theme of the prelude to the third act. “It was irresistible—it always is. On the way home in the cab he kissed her—kissed her with an intensity of passion and at the same time a tact, an adeptness, for which the semiotics and the absent-mindedness had left her entirely unprepared. After that it became only too evident that her engagement to poor dear Randolph had been a mistake. But what a hue and cry when she announced her intention of becoming Mrs. Henry Maartens! A half-mad professor, with nothing but his salary, divorced by his first wife and old enough, into the bargain, to be her father! But all they could say was entirely irrelevant. The only things that mattered was the fact that Henry belonged to another species; and that, not Randolph’s—Homo sapiens and not Homo moronicus—was the species she now was interested in. Three weeks after the earthquake they got married. Had she ever regretted her millionaire? Regretted Randolph? To this inconceivably ridiculous question the answer was a peal of laughter. But his horses, she added as she wiped the tears from her eyes, his horses were another matter. His horses were Arabians, and the cattle on his ranch were pure-bred Herefords, and he had a big pond behind the ranch house, with all kinds of the most heavenly ducks and geese. The worst of being a poor professor’s wife in a big town was that you never had a chance of getting away from people. Sure, there were plenty of good people, intelligent people. But the soul cannot live by people alone; it needs horses, it needs pigs and waterfowl. Randolph could have provided her with all the animals her heart could desire—but at a price: himself. She had sacrificed the animals and chosen genius—genius with all its drawbacks. And frankly (she admitted it with a laugh, she talked about it with humorous detachment) frankly there were drawbacks. In his own way, albeit for entirely different reasons, Henry could be almost as dumb as Randolph himself. An idiot where human relations were concerned, a prize ass in all the practical affairs of life. But what an unboring ass, what a luminous idiot! Henry could be utterly insupportable; but he was always worth it. Always! And maybe, she paid me the compliment of adding, maybe when I got married, my wife would feel the same way about me. Insupportable, but worth it.”

  “I thought you said she wasn’t consciously sexy,” I commented.

  “And it’s true,” he said. “You think she was baiting her hook with flattery. She wasn’t. She was just stating a fact. I had my points; but I was also unbearable. Twenty years of formal education and a lifetime of my poor mother had produced a real monster.” On the outspread fingers of his left hand he itemized the monster’s components. “I was a learned bumpkin; I was an athlete who couldn’t say Bo to a girl; I was a pharisee with a sense of inferiority; I was a prig who secretly envied the people he disapproved of. And yet, in spite of everything, it was worth while to put up with me. I was enormously well meaning.”

  “And in this case, I imagine, you did more than mean well. Were you in love with her?” I asked.

  There was a little pause; then Rivers slowly nodded.

  “Overwhelmingly,” he said.

  “But you couldn’t say Bo to a girl.”

  “This wasn’t a girl,” he answered. “This was Henry’s wife. Bo was unthinkable. Besides, I was an honorary Maartens, and that made her my honorary mother. And it wasn’t just a question of morality. I never wanted to say Bo. I loved her metaphysically, almost theologically—the way Dante loved Beatrice, the way Petrarch loved Laura. With one slight difference, however. In my case it happened to be sincere. I actually lived my idealism. No little illegitimate Petrarchs on the side. No Mrs. Alighieri, and none of those whores that Dante found it necessary to resort to. It was passion, but it was also chastity; and both at white heat. Passion and chastity,” he repeated, and shook his head. “At sixty one forgets what the words stand for. Today I only know the meaning of the word that has replaced them—indifference. Io son Beatrice,” he declaimed. “And all is dross that is not Helena. So what? Old age has something else to think about.”