The January day was cold and bright when Martin stopped by my office to tell me Caltech was letting him start in the middle of the year. He was driving the Subaru out to Pasadena, but he traveled light: his modest wardrobe, his computers, his poster of Feynman and his set of Feynman’s Lectures on Physics.
“You’ve been great, Vic, really great. I know my grandmother hired you—I found your contract when I was packing up her things to put the house on the market. I can’t pay your bill right now, and even if I could it wouldn’t come close to what I owe you for finding Martina’s patent and coming to Tinney to save me and all those things. But if the book makes any money—”
“Stop,” I said. “If the book makes any money you’ll do something in Martina’s memory. Anyway, Dr. Herschel is taking care of my professional fee.”
We’d hired Arthur Harriman, the young German-speaking librarian at the University of Chicago, to translate Martina’s journals. They seemed interesting enough that the Gaudy Press had given Harriman and Martin a contract to write a memoir, threading her story together with the history of nuclear weapons.
One afternoon, I went with Martin to the Special Collections room at the University of Chicago Library. We returned the second page of Ada Byron’s letter to Benjamin Dzornen, which Martin had lifted back in August. We talked to the librarian, Rachel Turley, about the BREENIAC sketch, which I’d sent her. Alison came with us: we had a kind of formal ceremony, in which Alison relinquished any claim to the sketch on Metargon’s part and Ms. Turley thanked us for the bequest, and said she would overlook Martin’s removing a library document.
“Anyway, thank you, Vic,” Martin said the afternoon he stopped at my office. “I’m going to head west now. I’m spending the night in Tinney. Dorothy’s forgiven me for all that mess back in September. She knows it wasn’t my fault or yours, so I’m stopping there on my way to California. Will you visit my mother sometimes? I mean, not take her on, she’s not easy to be with, but just so she’s not completely on her own?”
I promised.
“And Alison. She’s kind of in a difficult place right now. Hard to believe a billionaire could be in a difficult place, but, you know, her father’s been arrested, her mother is still drinking, and she’s kind of on her own. Can you let her know you haven’t forgotten her?”
I promised him that as well. He and Alison had decided that their lives were on such separate tracks these days that a romantic relationship wasn’t possible, but they were remaining friends, as their generation was able to do.
I sympathized with Kitty, angry with a mother whose mind searched the outer reaches of time and space but had little room to spare for a human daughter. Perhaps Martin, inheriting his great-grandmother’s powerful gifts, would forge a life that held more balance.
I waved good-bye to Martin. At the end of the evening, I drove over to Lotty’s apartment. Angel, the doorman, warned me that she had an early surgery call in the morning.
“I have a package for her,” I said, “Something I know she’ll want to see.”
While the librarian, Rachel Turley, had been meeting with Alison and Martin, I had requested a file from the Dzornen papers. I’d performed a little sleight of hand at the photocopy machine. I was preserving, I was confiscating, I was restoring.
When I got off the elevator at her floor, Lotty was waiting for me in her red dragon dressing gown, her face anxious, wondering what new crisis I was bringing to her.
I handed her the packet. When she opened it and saw the letter from her grandfather to Dzornen, written in pencil on the title page of the Radetzkymarsch, she stared at it for a long moment. “Oh, Vic, oh, daughter of my heart. For this—oh, thank you.”
TINNEY, ILLINOIS
Finding the Harmonies
SHE KNOWS THE JANUARY AIR is cold, but her bulky coat gets in her way when she’s making adjustments to the lenses. She doesn’t shiver as she unwraps her telescope. It’s as if she were eighteen again on the Wildspitze, embracing the glacier water.
The heavens lie open above her and her heart, that aged frail muscle, stirs as it always has at the purity of light.
Benjamin said to her on their last night in G?ttingen, “You are not human, Martina. One does not lie with a lover to talk about spectral lines, one seeks the comfort afforded by our human bodies. It’s as if you have no feelings in you.”