The Eighth Day (38 page)

She said: “Until I'm sure of what I have to tell you—very sure—my mother mustn't know it; or your mother. George came back three nights ago. He ran away from town on the night before Father was killed. He rode on freight cars, as hoboes do. He went to California and became an actor. He's been very sick. There are many things. I have to tell you. I haven't been able to tell them to anybody.”

Again she gazed over his shoulder in silence. To himself Roger said: “But I
know
her. We must have said thousands of words to one another.”

“I've read some of the essays you wrote for the paper. Miss Doubkov lent them to me. I think you'll understand. I mean, I think you'll help me understand.” She put out her hand. “Maybe we'll have to be very very strong and very brave.”

The train gave a jerk. The whistle blew. Some girls came up to Félicité shrieking: “Filly! Filly! The train's starting. You'll be left behind.”

“That's why I can't tell you with all these girls around. It's secret, very secret.—Listen! Miss Doubkov has a store on Main Street. I help her sometimes. I have the key. She said she's not going to work there on Christmas Eve. Can you come there tomorrow morning at half past ten?”

“Filly! Filly! You'll be left behind!”

“Yes, I can.”

The hazel and the blue of her eyes seemed to darken. “Maybe it's not true. Maybe it's true and terrible. But if it's true we must know it. The important thing is to
prove
to everybody that your father was innocent.”

She quickly put her hand in his, murmured, “Tomorrow at ten-thirty,” and entered the car. Roger resumed his seat. He reopened his book, but his eyes kept returning to the sealskin cap at the far end of the car. “What a girl!” Félicité sat motionless on the aisle; her companions babbled and fluttered about her like doves. Their voices were shrill with the excitement of the coming holiday. He heard their insistent “Filly” this and “Filly” that.

Roger said to himself: “I shall marry that girl.”

Hoboken, New Jersey, is a town bearing a Dutch name, once largely inhabited by people of German descent. The majority of the houses were of red brick, agreeably shaded by locust and linden trees. In good weather the citizens of Hoboken enjoyed (and still enjoy) sitting on benches along the waterfront watching the ships entering and leaving New York harbor. A great deal of beer was brewed and drunk in Hoboken, but the consumption in the various beer halls was sedate and ruminative rather than boisterous. The town contained an engineering school. Most of its students came from a distance and made fun of the town and its brewers; when they wished to enjoy themselves they took the ferry to New York, where “life” was reported to abound.

One Sunday morning in the spring of 1883 John Ashley, twenty-one years old, was sitting on a waterfront bench with Beata Kellerman, nineteen, daughter of one of the more prosperous brewers. He was wearing the new suit that he had bought for Easter. It was green—almost “bottle green.” His domed hat was brown. His new shoes were yellow and shone. He wore a high stiff collar. The lapels on his light tan overcoat were of plum-colored velvet. These were the clothes of a rich man's son, but they were ill-chosen and suggested the country boy. At no time in his life was there anything remarkable to observe in John Ashley except his large nose, his attentive blue eyes, and his taciturnity. He was neither dark nor light, tall nor short, fat nor thin, handsome nor homely. His taciturnity did not proceed from shyness. He had no self-consciousness whatever. It sprang from his desire not to miss anything. He was constantly filled with wonder: mathematics and the laws of physics were wonderful; a day like this Sunday morning was wonderful; wonderful were the ships before him, the sea gulls, the clouds in the sky and the laws of vaporization that governed them; it was wonderful to be young with a long crowded life before him. Above all the girl beside him was wonderful. She would be his wife and they would have many wonderful children. Beata's clothes also gave evidence of a rich father—from the high-buttoned shoes on her large feet to the fringed parasol in her mittened hand. Beata, however, arrested attention. She was a German version of a Greek goddess—“Junoesque,” said her drawing master—with wide-set prominent blue eyes, a splendid nose, and a full cushioned chin. Beata, too, was taciturn, but for different reasons. She had recently emerged from a life in which nothing was wonderful. She had learned to know John Ashley. For her that was wonder enough.

On that morning Hoboken was very quiet. Not even church bells were heard, for an epidemic was at its height and the churches were closed. The disease had recurred for many years with varying symptoms and under different names. In 1883 it was called the “Maryland pneumonia.” Door after door bore the purple notice of infection and some the crêpe of mourning. Many students had been withdrawn by their parents from the Institute. John Ashley, too, had been summoned home, but had turned a deaf ear. He was the only child of doting parents in upper New York State. Idolized sons are not noted for gratitude or obedience. He had, in addition, little acquaintance with fear. He believed that illness and accident are apportioned to those who deserve them. He was now living in an empty house. The family with whom he boarded had fled the town and were making their home with relatives on a farm in Pennsylvania. Beata's family had driven to church in New York City and would not return until evening. Beata and the servants had solemnly promised her parents that they would not leave the house during the day. She was presumably sitting in the parlor practicing a sonata by Beethoven with a brazier of smoking sulphur beside her. She was an exceptionally obedient daughter. Beata had spent her life in a prison house of many fears; from these her love for John Ashley had recently freed her. She no longer feared her mother or the mockery of her brothers and sisters or the opinion of her mother's friends. Above all she had been freed from a fear of life itself—a confused dread of “men” and “babies,” and of an eternity of days spent in Hoboken. Within six weeks John Ashley had dispersed all these clouds. The crown of her love for him was gratitude.

John and Beata sat on the bench in the plague-stricken town. They looked at the sunlight on the water. They spoke little. Any words but the most commonplace would disturb the mounting music that filled them.

“. . . ? a wonderful morning!”

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

We fashion our lives by the operation of our imaginations, or—as Goethe said—“Beware what you long for in your youth, for you will get it in your middle age,” by which we presume he meant that we shall get it or some botched caricature of it. John Ashley's imagination was limited in some areas, but not in this: he wanted to be a husband and the father of many children; he wanted to be married by the age of twenty-two so that his older children would be passing through the teens before he was forty; he wanted to live at a distance from the Atlantic coast in a large house surrounded by verandahs—a house somewhat untidy, perhaps, because of the tumult of life within it, all those young boys and girls; he wanted a workshop near the house, filled with the proper tools and equipment, in which he could perform his experiments and make his useful and useless inventions. It never occurred to him to wish for wealth (sufficient means to maintain a family came
of themselves
to any serious-minded and diligent young man), fame (being well-known must waste a lot of a man's time), learning (he had never discovered much to interest him in books), wisdom, “philosophy,” spiritual insight (things like that also came
of themselves
as one grew older, presumably). He had a fairly clear picture of his future wife: she would be beautiful and very nearly perfect—that is, without vanity, envy, malice, or deference to the opinion of others. She would be an exemplary housewife. She would be, like himself, slow to speak, but endowed with a beautiful speaking voice—that of his doting mother managed to be both nasal and flat.

There were other elements in Ashley's picture of his future that were less clear to him, but he was in no doubt about the first steps. He would lead his classes, thereby being enabled to select on graduation the job that most suited him. He would be married on the day after that graduation. As he was to reside in Hoboken for four years he resolved to search for a wife in the community. On his trips to New York he kept his eyes well open. The girls in the city seemed to him to be invested with a fatiguing vivacity; they never stopped talking; they laughed too loudly in public and they waved their hands about in the air. A small-town boy himself, he wished to marry a small-town girl.

“. . . ?'t's so peaceful!”

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

John Ashley led all his classes and was president of his fraternity, but he took little interest in his fellow students. (He resigned from the house in his senior year and moved into private lodgings.) He was naturally endowed for sports, but did not engage in them. He lacked any competitive sense and appeared to lack ambition. But he was never idle; he explored the laws of mechanics and electricity, and he hunted women.

He intimidated his professors. Some had known gifted pupils, but none had ever seen a student who approached mechanics in the spirit of play. They gave him enlarged space in the laboratory and furnished him with expensive equipment. The energy it engendered rang bells (they played “'Nita, Juanita”) and threw numerals and letters on a grid from a clavier. He came near killing himself a number of times; he blew out windows, blackened ceilings, and almost reduced the laboratory to ashes; but grave accidents do not befall young Ashleys. His special laboratory privileges were regretfully withdrawn. As graduation approached the Dean and a number of his advisers discussed inviting the young man to join the faculty, but voices were raised against the appointment. “Inventors” were suspect and it was obvious that Ashley was of that sort. However, they hung his mechanical drawings in the school's corridors—they were of unprecedented clarity and beauty and remained there for years—and wrote handsome letters of recommendation on his behalf. Ashley also played with mechanics at his lodgings. His room resembled some eccentric scientist's cavern in a novel by Jules Verne. When, at dawn, the hands of his clock reached five-thirty a pillow fell from the ceiling on his face; in cold weather a long steel arm lowered the window, another lit a burner under a tea kettle. He played with mathematics. There were always six to ten card games in progress at his fraternity house. He drew up charts analyzing the probabilities governing whist, Jack Gallagher, and pinochle. Since he had no competitive sense, no malice, and no need of money, his interest in the card games was limited to preventing any one member of the group from winning overmuch.

If these activities reflected the spirit of play, his search for a wife was very serious indeed. He was interested only in girls of strict upbringing. An earnest hunter studies the terrain, observes the habits, runs, and feeding grounds of his quarry; he fits himself out with appropriate equipment and arms himself with patience. Soon after his arrival in Hoboken he began laying his plans. He enrolled as a student of the German language. He attended the Lutheran church. It was a general rule among the prosperous German families that their daughters would have nothing to do with the students at the Institute, and it was common knowledge at the Institute that the girls of Hoboken were heavy-footed “Dutchies,” unworthy of a lively young man's attention. But John Ashley never waited to form his opinions on those of his contemporaries; his aims were above their vision and his methods beyond their patience. He followed girls on the street and learned their names and addresses. He was welcomed at the church. Introduction led to introduction. He was invited to Sunday dinners. He, in turn, invited girls (and their mothers) to lectures with lantern slides—“Our December Sky,” “
Goethe und die Tiere
”—and to minstrel shows. At the close of these entertainments there was much shaking of hands in the aisles and further introductions. There were dances and balls in Hoboken long before dancing was accepted in similar communities elsewhere. He threw a wide net. Girl led to girl. He was tracking a great prize before he knew that she existed. He stalked by faith. The hunt was time consuming, but we all have time to expend on what is essential to our nature. Finally—late, when he had almost given up hope, in the second quarter of his senior year—he saw Beata Kellerman. A month later he was introduced to her. Three months later he eloped with her.

Mysterious are the laws of sexual selection. Ashley chose Beata to be his wife much as his son Roger was to choose his life's career—by elimination. He was a favorite with the mothers and younger sisters; the fathers and brothers found him uninteresting. Naturally, he kept a score card. Trude Gruber and Lisl Grau liked him very much, but they could not restrain themselves from laughing at him. Everyone could see that the other Grau twin, Heidi, was a little in love with him, but she was given to saying that she hated cooking and sewing and “all those stupid
Hausfrau
things.” Gretchen Hofer (he knew four Gretchens) couldn't imagine how a girl would want to leave Hoboken to live in the West where there were nothing but Red Indians and rattlesnakes. In his third year it seemed to him that he had found what he was looking for—Marianne Schmidt. On Sunday afternoons they sat on the benches and watched the ships entering and leaving New York Harbor. Marianne was seventeen, beautiful, slow to speak, and thoughtful. She possessed the unusual ability to make Ashley talk. She wanted to know what he was learning at the Institute. Finally she confided that she wished to go to Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts to study chemistry. She planned to be a “lady doctor” to treat children. She had read that in Germany and France a woman could become a doctor—a real doctor, like a man. Ashley listened to her for a while, then ventured a reply. Marianne was unable at first to understand what he was saying. She couldn't believe her ears. It seemed that he thought it wasn't healthy to work among sick people all the time.