THE PRINCIPLE UNCERTAINTY
Toby pulls out of the parking lot of the car rental at the Memphis International Airport, and heads home for the first time in years. Nothing but his grandfather’s funeral could have dragged him back here; he wonders if he should have come even for this.
The car’s heater blasts volumes of hot air, but Beth sits in the passenger’s seat, shivering in the down jacket Toby suggested she might want to borrow from her brother. “I thought,” she says, “the South was supposed to have mild winters.” She blows into her cupped hands.
“This is mild,” Toby assures her. “Compared to the blizzards they’re having in Chicago right now.”
She glances at him. “This isn’t Chicago, though,” she points out in her soft voice. In reply, he merely grins at her.
They cross the bridge over the Mississippi into Arkansas, the wide river frothing beneath them. Interstate highway makes up the first twenty miles of the trip, but for the next 45, they endure winding, pot-holed state roads. The last five miles degenerate to nothing but county gravel. On one side of the lane stretch fields filled with pale, dry stalks of corn, quivering in the wind; on the other side stand leafless forests.
Beth shakes her head and says, “Even the desert is greener than this.”
“Wrong season,” Toby says. “You ought to be here in the spring. Then it’s green. Winter is nothing but gray and miserable.”
They pull off the meandering county road into the oak-lined, no-nonsense driveway which shoots straight toward Toby’s home. As they draw nearer, Toby’s mother stands up from the porch swing. She wears black slacks and blouse. She pulls a black sweater around her more tightly. Spry, with threads of silver in her short, dark hair, at 48 she moves with as much energy as Beth, who is 25 years younger. Toby stops the car. He and Beth get out. The women exchange kisses on the cheek, but Toby’s mother greets her son with a hug stronger than expected. Automatically, he tightens his own.
Finally she steps back. “Your dad,” she tells him, “is taking it hard.”
Years ago, before Toby and Beth married, before they even met, Toby quarreled with his father, and though nowadays they’ve gotten to where they will speak, they both are always formal and cool with each other.
Toby’s mother’s eyes are moist, and as he holds her hand, it trembles slightly. That may be from the cold, though; he doesn’t know. “I tried,” his mother says, “talking it over with him, but what he really needs is another man.” She looks down at the wooden planks of the porch. “He’s in the library,” she says, pronouncing her words carefully, softly.
Instead of going in to his father, though, Toby goes to the car and gets the suitcases. With one in each hand, he enters the foyer and heads up the sweeping stairway. This is the first time Beth has seen his family home. She pauses at the foot of the stairs, and says in her best Scarlett O’Hara voice, “Tara.”
Toby looks down from the landing at her. Clear afternoon sunlight falls through the window behind him and splashes at her feet in a luminous red pool on the mahogany floor. “Frankly, my dear,” he says, shaking his head, “not even close.”
“Close enough for this city-bumpkin,” she says with a laugh. Her hand glides along the bannister as she rises up the stairs to his side. “You’ll have to show me around the ranch,” she says.
“Farm,” he corrects her. Then, as if to soften the edge in his voice, he promises, “Later.”
Across the hallway from the guest suite is a smaller bedroom. He ignores it; Beth, though, can’t. She leans inside its doorway and says, “This has to be your room.”
“Wrong tense,” he says in that cool voice he can have at times. “Was my room.”
She grins and asks, “Know how I could tell?”
Toby stands beside Beth and looks into the room. His collection of fighter jet models, put together while he was in grade school, junior high, and high school, takes up every space not occupied by a book. On the wall opposite the window hangs a Navy recruitment poster of the Blue Angels precision flight team. The lure of the skies and the mysteries of flight laid the groundwork for Toby’s decision to pursue the study of physics through the doctorial level and beyond. In the lab where he works now, his team takes a leading role in the global search for the smallest particle of matter.
He turns and heads to the larger bedroom across the hall. He tosses their suitcases on the bed and opens his with an aggressive flip. As he takes out a shirt and starts toward the closet with it, Beth touches his arm. “I can do that if you want to go talk to your dad.”
He shrugs. “I don’t want to,” he confesses, “but I guess I should.” He hands her the shirt, and goes back down the stairs to confront his father, and, if need be, to comfort him because that’s what sons are supposed to do.
The door to the library is mahogany. In the middle of that dark expanse, an engraved brass plate proclaims Libris, the Latin an affectation which, like so many other things about his family, has always annoyed Toby.
He taps on the door. No reply comes through the dark wood, but he goes in anyway. It is, after all, his home too.
The library is one of the smallest rooms in the house. The shadowy walls are crammed floor to ceiling with books – some quite old and valuable. A couple of plush chairs are each paired with a reading lamp. Overall, the room gives off such a dark air of claustrophobic unwelcome that Toby never felt comfortable in it. Most of their guests, he noticed over the years, have the same reaction. His father is the only person Toby knows who seems to enjoy being in here.
When Toby enters, his father is seated in a cone of light from a reading lamp, one of the thick tomes of family history open in his lap. He gives a guilty start, as if he has been caught in some act he wishes no one to see. Ancestor worship, he has often said, should be left to the Chinese.
“Toby.” His voice quavers, threatens to break.
Toby expects only the usual handshake, but his father stands and hugs him tighter than Mom did. Toby takes the emotion as a sign of tension rather than affection. Toby knows his father loves him in his own way, but the need to qualify his sentiments with that superficial, hackneyed phrase, underscores how superficial and hackneyed Toby feels that love to be.
“Did Beth come with you?” Toby’s father asks. It’s a simple question, just to get the conversation started. Nothing more.
Toby steps back. “Of course,” he says. “Did you think she wouldn’t?” He barely manages to suppress the hostile tone in his voice.
His father tries to appease him with a smile. “Of course not,” he says. He nods. “Of course I expected her to come. I’m glad she could.”
Having grown up in the family, Toby recognizes the contortions flickering across his father’s face as his best approximation of a smile. The shadows of the library fold gently around him, softening the decades-old scars which zigzag over his face like railroad tracks across rocky terrain. Though his cheeks and forehead glow with a warm flush, the tint of his nose remains cool. A thin line runs around the base of it, but even after all these years, the scars which crisscross his face are as livid as whip welts.
His disfigurement happened during college, cutting short the family’s plans for his degree in business management like his father. He was partying and joy-riding one night with drunken fraternity buddies. Their car slammed into a tree, engulfing everyone in a pyre which killed all but him. His father’s money bought expensive plastic surgery which restored neither his looks nor his confidence.
The clock in the hall strikes a quarter past three.
After an awkward pause, Toby’s father says, “We need to leave for the funeral home soon. They told us they’d have the body ready at four.”
“How’s Mom taking it?” Toby asks.
He asks about his mother because he needs reassurance that she’s sticking to her self-imposed restriction of alcohol. This, he’s afraid, is too good an excuse for her to backslide.
Toby’s mother and father met at the Burn Rehabilitation Clinic in Little Rock. Her home had caught fire the night before Christmas, and while trying to save her younger sister, she, a young girl herself then, suffered major burns over most of her body. Her calamity, though, had not scarred her as visibly as his had him. They had been the support each other needed so desperately, and their eventual engagement surprised no one.
His father says, “She’s doing well,” not really giving Toby the information he wants, avoiding the subject. He looks down, mouth grim, arms limp. “How’s the research going?” he asks, though his interest is obviously forced.
“Same as always,” Toby tells him. Toby picks up a book lying in the other chair. Gulliver’s Travels. His mother’s favorite. “A fellow in Bern claims to have a definite case of action at a distance.” Toby looks at the book without really seeing it, then tosses it back down in the chair. “He’s even come up with a theory to account for it,” he says. “Something to do with dissecting matter into what he calls sheeting action instead of particles.”
Toby has always felt his father to be lax in his enthusiasm for Toby’s chosen field of physics. Now, however, he turns to Toby, his eyes sparkling in the dim light. He says, “There is, you know, action at a distance.” He seems glad for the chance to say something positive. “Not that it would stand up to the rigor of your science, of course. It’s more psychology or sociology. In fact, more economics than anything. More squishy science than hard.”
Toby can’t argue with him. His father has just lost the most important person in his life, the man who literally put him back together and made him everything he is.
“No one,” his father goes on, “is self-sufficient.” His voice climbs higher; he speaks with a rush of enthusiasm. As if this is his chance to explain something. What that would be, though, would be difficult to say.
“People and atoms,” his father assures Toby, “don’t go whirling through space, unaffected by each other. The world isn’t a box of marbles,” he says. “Atoms and quarks and people aren’t billiard balls bouncing around the cosmic pool table, to be understood just by measuring where they are and where they’re headed.”
Toby has never heard his father carry on like this. He has no idea what to answer.
“The world,” Toby’s father assures his son, “isn’t made up of dots of matter. It isn’t a collection of things. It’s a range of experience. A continuum of action, not a hodgepodge of objects.”
He reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out the box of lozenges he has substituted for the several packs of cigarettes he used to go through daily. “You split your molecules,” he says, “into atoms and your atoms into quarks, but when you split those, you just find another particle because it’s all only a question of perception anyway.”
He takes a lozenge out of the box, drops the box back into his pocket, and continues talking. “You’ll never find a molecule of beauty, an atom of honesty, a quark of love. Those are human values. They’re what human beings bring to the world, but they’re just as real as steel or oxygen.”
He pops the candy into his mouth.
Toby knows his dad is wrong about science reducing the world to a box of marbles. Even physics, he knows only too well, doesn’t have all the answers.
In fact, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that absolute knowledge of the physical world is impossible: any vector which conducts information also conducts energy, and energy means change, so that at the subatomic level, the simple act of observation changes the results.
In the hallway, the clock strikes the half-hour. “It’s time,” Toby’s father says. “Time to go.”
The viewing is scheduled to last until ten p.m. They all agree it would probably be best to take both cars.
Hodges’ isn’t the only funeral home in town, but it’s the one the family has used for the last seventy years. Built almost a century earlier by the wealthiest man in the area, the two-story brick mansion was sold as part of bankruptcy proceedings after he lost everything during the Stock Market Crash of the ‘20’s. With the house’s colonnaded porch and high-vaulted rooms, echoes of antebellum glory still waft around the viewing room, the towering flower displays, and the casket.
People crowd into the spacious parlor. Toby thinks half the county must be here with the other half on their way. He knows most of them: relatives, childhood friends, sweethearts from high school and chums from the country club. He introduces Beth to his cousin Bobby, now in his third term as mayor, who speaks in a rather too loud voice of his hopes for the city.
Bobby goes on about the intricacies of public office, the one-upmanship of politics. To people like him, he explains, public service is important. The common good is best served, he believes, by participation in the peoples’ government. He rambles on, spouting dogma which could not interest Toby less. Mom comes over, smiles at the mayor, nods her head at whatever gibberish he’s spouting, and takes Beth by the arm, leading her away, rescuing her, but leaving Toby stranded in the worse kind of lurch.
Bobby chortles a snickering sound, and edges half a step nearer. To Toby’s way of thinking, the mayor has let himself gain too much weight. Far too much. And both his chins need a closer shave. “So,” says Bobby, “how goes astronomy?”
Toby loosens his tie just a bit so it doesn’t have such a stranglehold on him. “I have no idea. My work in physics keeps me too busy to dabble in other areas.”
The mayor smiles his simpering smile, clears his throat, and says in his best election-campaign voice, “Hang it all, I thought for sure your father told me you worked in astronomy.”
Toby nods. “Knowing my father, he may have. However, I don’t.”
Both Toby and Bobby attended the same school through tenth grade. They had far different interests, though, and seldom saw each other. During their junior year in high school, both boys, to the astonishment of each set of parents, tried out for the class presentation of Our Town. An intense rivalry ensued between them for the part of George Gibbs. After a few weeks of acrimonious maneuvers which threatened to engulf their families in a three-generational feud, the part had gone to a senior, the pet of Mrs. Bunch, the teacher directing the play. Her choice, whether politically motivated or not, soothed the roiling waters, and during the production, Toby and Bobby became much closer. When Toby left for college, though, the distance stretched their tenuous relationship too thin, and they seldom spoke after that. Now, even though Toby hasn’t talked to his cousin in several years, he says, “Listen, Bobby, I’ve enjoyed seeing you again, but I’d like to circulate, chat with some other folks.”
“Sure,” the mayor bellows. “I understand. You go ahead and make the rounds, but I do want to talk with you later. Physics has always fascinated me.”
Toby mirrors the mayor’s plastic smile, confident Bobby won’t recognize the parody. “I’m sure.” He turns away, scanning the room for anyone to talk to.
A random swirl in the crowd opens a lane to the back of the room where the casket sits almost hidden in its glen-like drapery of flowers and ferns. Toby strolls to the coffin. His grandfather looks regal nestled in the plush red velvet. With his full head of white hair, his sharp cheekbones, and his solid chin, he makes a stately match for his wife, buried in the same lavish style ten years earlier. Even in death, they make quite a pair. Like marble bookends, their lives fit like parentheses around a discrete, orderly period in the family’s long, convoluted history. Through wars political and economic, through familial skirmishes and ambushes by outsiders, Grandfather and Grandmother guided with steady hands and stoic demeanors. Toby wonders what will become of the family without such formidable stewards.
He reaches into the casket and plucks a piece of white fluff off his grandfather’s sleeve.
A voice at his side says, “He would have appreciated that.”
Toby turns. Beside him stands an incredibly ancient woman Toby does not recognize. He draws a breath to ask her name, but it suddenly dawns on him that she’s Mrs. Agnus, the county librarian. He uses the breath to say, “He prided himself on his fastidiousness.”
She has changed much since he last saw her. Her regal posture has become stooped, her flamboyant hair a sparse, gray tangle. He remembers her skin as wrinkled but glowing; now even more wrinkled and blotched with age spots, it has an almost hide-like texture. Her eyes he remembers as large and luminous, a quality he associated with her existence in the shadowy library; now, though still large, those eyes have become dull and hollow, without sparkle or shine. He never knew her in her youth, but somehow he rues the loss of her middle-age.
“Fastidious.” She nods. “A good word for him. Did you know that at one time he and I dated? Before he married, of course. I can still feel my hair blowing in the wind as we sped along country lanes in his fancy little imported roadster with its top down. Sometimes he would reach out as if for the stick shift, but lay his hand on my knee instead. We’d laugh, and look into each other’s eyes, and I could see the whole universe reflected there. I wonder if his wife had memories of such happiness.”
Melancholia washes over Toby, the first feeling of loss he has experienced in connection with the death of his grandfather. The emotion, however, has no attachment to his ancestor; rather it depends from this woman’s triteness, her sentimentality so bourgeois. It sullies his memories of the man as a pioneer, an innovator. If she had proclaimed something about his grandfather that flew in the face of convention – that he and she had once hunted lions on the plains of the Serengeti or that they had harpooned narwhales in the Arctic – that would have eased his mind. Her petty romances, though, give him pause, make him wonder if his grandfather’s existence really was so banal, so stale and pedestrian.
“What happened? Why did you split up?” Toby asks. “I would think he would enjoy the company of someone who loved books so.”
“Loved books?” She gives him a hard glare, squinty and full of deviousness. “You have it wrong there, boy. I hate books. I hate them with a passion. Always have.”
“But,” he begins.
“I know,” she interrupts, holding up her withered hand to cut him short. “I know. I’ve heard it a thousand times. ‘How could you be a librarian if you hate books?’ Just because a person bakes potato cakes doesn’t mean she likes eating them.” She states her case with the air of having said the same thing many times before. Her brow furrows, her lower lip protrudes; her whole countenance dares him to contradict her.
He doesn’t, though. In fact, he understands her perfectly. He understands how a person can separate work from life. Just because he has always felt satisfied doing what he does for a living, doesn’t mean everyone does. There must be flight attendants who would rather be opera conductors, or policemen who would rather sell insurance, or pastors in the pulpit who fantasize about directing maneuvers on the battlefield. The list could go on forever, and so defies further analysis. One can only accept it and move on.
“Of course,” he says.
Her grumble softens, and her expression grows placid again. She manages to smile at him, though he has the feeling the effort stems purely from social indulgence on her part; the word ‘disingenuous’ comes to his mind. She heaves a great sigh, and says, “He will be missed,” as if that should comfort him. She pats his arm.
As a reflex, he looks down at her hand and sees the cluster of diamonds on her ring. He nods at her finger and asks, “Did your husband give you that?” The spirit of his question borders on insolence because he wants her to realize what a double standard she is using to judge the memories of her husband and of his father.
She stares at the jewelry, at its flash and sizzle. “Yes,” she says. “He had his moments, one has to admit. He did have his moments.” Deep within her dark eyes a twinkle ignites; the spark seems no benign warmth and frolic, though, but the reflection of a banked fire on the verge of bursting into raging flame again. “He really was a good man.” She lifts her hand from his arm, turns away, and drifts back into the currents of the crowd.
As Toby watches the librarian wander away, he sees his wife and mother standing together near a head-high wreath of yellow roses mixed with lavender flowers. He starts toward the women, but changes his mind and veers toward the hallway instead. Across the empty foyer, he spies the discreet sign for the men’s room. He pushes his way through the swinging door. When he sees someone standing at one of the urinals, he hesitates, contemplating a stall instead, but the other fellow looks over his shoulder, and recognizing Toby, grins. “Hey, feller,” he says.
Vernon Blank has always prided himself on his status as one of the good ol’ boys even though he’s president of the King Cotton Bank and Trust. It took him years to rise through the ranks of the corporate world, but he has never lost the rough grain of his backwoods upbringing. Son of indigent sharecroppers, Vernon has done well for himself. His insistence on the supremacy of finance as a topic of discussion, though, irritates Toby. The man’s preoccupation with lucre makes his conversations dull and one-sided, but as holder of the majority of mortgages in the county, he constitutes a presence few can avoid. Though he considers himself savvy and sophisticated, he wields his power with a ham-fisted hand which, to Toby, betrays a fundamental insecurity. The fact that Grandfather used Vernon’s capital for improvements on the farm galls Toby because it makes the family vulnerable to the banker’s machinations and Toby to his intimacy.
“Listen, buddy,” Vernon says. “I want to express my deepest sorrow at your grandfather’s passing.”
To Toby, the fact that Vernon says this while urinating reflects the level of the man’s sincerity. Nevertheless, to ignore him would grant him too much import, so Toby says, “Thank you very much, Vernon,” and goes about his business, too.
“Didn’t I hear someone say that you’re at one of those big research places over in Europe somewhere now? Some big government project?” Vernon zips his pants, but loiters, chatting with Toby.
“You may have heard that,” Toby says, “but I never have been. I settled in Tucson. We live up in the mountains outside the city.”
“Tucson, Arizona? What in the world is in the middle of the desert that would interest a brain like you?”
“A small private lab. On the cutting edge of R & D.”
Vernon cocks his head. “R & D?”
“Research and development.”
“Oh, yeah. Now I see. What do you do there? Develop new stuff?”
“That and research.” As Toby expected, his irony escapes Vernon’s notice.
“Sounds over my head, I’m afraid. Listen, Toby. I’m glad I ran into you here. It gives us a chance to talk. You know. One on one. I want to ask you. You know, I’ve got my investors to answer to, and, well, I’m worried about the situation out at your family’s. I mean no disrespect, but we’re all wondering about your daddy. Can we count on your daddy having the kind of business sense your granddaddy had? Now don’t get me wrong. We have every confidence in him, but, well, you see what I’ve driving at.”
Toby finishes his business. He goes to the sink and begins washing his hands. Vernon follows.
“If you’re worried about my father’s management abilities, Vernon, I’d suggest you talk to him about it. Feel him out. See how trustworthy you think he is.” Toby lathers his hands.
“Shoot, Toby. I’ve known your father all my life. It ain’t that I don’t trust him. I just want to feel more confident than some of the stories I’ve heard about him make me feel. You know what I mean. I just want some assurance I’m right in not being nervous about the bank’s investment. That’s all. Your granddaddy was one of our biggest accounts, and well, we have to know how secure that debt is.”
Something about the man’s obvious discomfort touches Toby. He considers himself no bleeding heart, but Vernon’s lack of acumen resonates deeply with Toby; it reminds him too much of his father’s vulnerability and need for protection. Still, in Vernon’s case, since he rose through the corporate world with nothing more than his native cutthroat ability, Toby feels the vulnerability is probably a ploy, the need for protection a mere cultivation.
Toby pulls a paper towel from the dispenser, and dries his hands. “My father may not have his father’s ruthlessness, but he developed his business sense at the feet of one of the masters, so I think you can rest easy about his value to you and your shareholders.” He crumples the towel into a ball, and tosses it into the can beneath the sink.
The tenseness in Vernon’s face relaxes, and he says, “You know, Toby, I once had hopes of you coming onboard with us. With that brain of yours, you could really go places in the banking world.”
Toby shakes his head. “The banking world wouldn’t have me.”
“Sure it would. It loves bright young men with a good head on their shoulders.”
“Not when those bright young men don’t believe in banking or in money or in capitalism.”
“I ,” Vernon begins, but then falters. “What do you mean, you don’t believe in money?”
Toby had started for the exit, but he pauses to regard Vernon more closely. “From the day the first capitalist offered to trade small, round, flat pieces of metal for a haunch of deer meat instead of tracking and killing the deer himself, a new type of plague has stalked the planet. To trade homegrown vegetables for deer meat might take a bit more effort in preparation and bartering, but at least value is traded for value. Capital has value only because you and I and total strangers collude in the fiction that it does. Money has no significance in and of itself. It has value only because strangers agree it does.”
Vernon gives Toby a dubious look. “Of course it has value. People are willing to do anything for it. They’ll kill for it. Heck, they’ll die for it. That gives it value.”
Toby narrows his eyes. “If you were lost in the middle of a desert, sunburned, dehydrated, dying of thirst, your tongue swollen and your throat coated with sand, which would have more value to you, a glass of water or five million dollars?”
“It isn’t that simply,” Vernon complains. “It’s more complicated than that.”
“No, it isn’t,” says Toby. “It really is that simple.” He holds up his hand to stave off Vernon’s reply. “I’d love to stand here and debate the matter with you, but I really do need to get back to the funeral.”
The reminder of death so close jolts Vernon. “Sure,” he says. He leads the way out of the restroom and back to the parlor where he immediately begins casting around for his wife; he says they have to get home to the kids. He expresses his condolences once more, shakes Toby’s hand, and moves off into the crowd. Toby makes no effort to hold him longer.
The crowd swirls. Babble ebbs and flows. Flowers perfume the air. Body heat fills the room. Toby spots his mother talking to some of her church friends, and he moves to her side. He touches her elbow. She looks around.
“Beth and I have had a long day,” he says. “We’re going back home. Can you and Dad manage?”
A smile glimmers on her lips. “You kids go catch up on your rest,” she says. “We old fogies will be along a little after ten.”
Toby gently pries Beth loose from a conversation with Biddy Deere, the county clerk.
Outside, a gibbous moon shines overhead; underfoot, frost glitters and crunches. The night is black. The stars sparkle. On the way to the car, Toby and Beth walk arm in arm. Their breath billows in white vapors.
“I was watching your father,” Beth says. “He moves so stiffly. He looks as if he’s in constant pain.”
“He has a lot to overcome,” Toby admits.
“Tell me again,” Beth says, “what happened to him.”
Toby recounts the story of the college party, the drinking, the sharp curve, the crash, the fire. “Why?” he asks. “I’ve told you that before.”
She leans against him in the cold. Their steps fall in unison, crushing the frost with matching rhythms. “And you never heard any other.” She hesitates. “Version?”
He glances at her, narrowing his eyes to see more deeply into the shadows surrounding her face. “What do you mean?”
They’ve reached the car, though, and she says with a shiver, “Let’s get out of this cold.”
He drives patiently, waiting for her to explain in her own time. “Your mother just told me,” she begins, “that the story about the car crash is a lie. Your grandfather invented it.”
Toby blurts, “What? Why?” Then in the same breath, he asks, “When did she tell you this?”
“While you were talking to the mayor.”
“I don’t believe it,” he says. “You must have misunderstood. Why would Grandfather make up a story like that? I can’t believe it. Why would everyone go along with it?” He grows quiet, and drives for several minutes in silence. Finally, he takes a deep breath and asks, “What really happened?”
So Beth tells him what his mother said his grandmother told her:
Through the 1960s, social upheaval had crackled across America. Student unrest boiled on college campuses all over the country. The institution of the Presidency had lost credibility. Attention focused on the war in Vietnam, but the real problem, as seen by men like Toby’s grandfather, stemmed from the boredom of a pampered generation that had grown up without enough responsibilities.
Toby’s father had been expected to go to college, get his degree in business management, and follow in his father’s footsteps, the same way things had been done since Reconstruction. He enrolled, but he lacked Grandfather’s discipline, and once in school, like so many of his friends and buddies, he spent more time having fun than studying. And like most young men, he fell in love.
She was two years older than he, a junior to his freshman. He took up with her crowd, a collection of young would-be revolutionaries driven by idealism and romance. The domineering personality in the group – not leader for anarchists claim to follow no one – preached a philosophy of confrontation. He tried to convince his fellows that it was better to go out in a blaze of glory, protesting the industrialists and warmongers, than to live a long, easy life of middle-class complacency. The only person he won over to his extremism, though, was the young woman loved by Toby’s father, whom she swept into the revolutionist’s schemes.
They chose a date, time, and place for maximum impact: noon on a Monday in front of the school’s Reserve Officers Training Corps headquarters. The three of them, long-haired, barefooted, wearing love beads and tattered jeans, sat on the lawn in front of the brick building. Other students, most in military
uniforms and with crew-cut hair, milled about on their way to and from classes or lunch.
Toby’s father sat and watched as the other two made their final preparations. Then he, his lover, and her idol dowsed each other with gasoline, and, singing a song of peace, struck with three hands a single match.
Toby would like to think that even as the flames charred his father’s flesh, his father sat stoic as a Buddhist monk, watching his fellow protesters burn. In truth, though, knowing him, his father probably screamed and beat the fire with his hands or rolled on the ground to smother the flames. At any rate, the three human torches were rushed to the hospital. Only Toby’s father survived.
Toby listens to the retelling silently, without response. When he and Beth get home, she tells him she plans on taking a long hot shower and going directly to bed. Toby goes to the library. Like his father, he sits in the small room with only one lamp shining. He picks up the volume of family history his father had been reading when Toby had surprised him earlier. A record of their ancestors in America before the Revolution, it is open to a page enumerating their slaves.
When Toby had told his parents that he intended to accept a full scholarship in physics at Stanford University, he had expected them to be proud and happy for him. Instead, both had stared at him, speechless. His father had finally broken into a grim chuckle. Men in the family, he explained, always graduated from the University of Mississippi. That’s what they had done for generations. It was the expected thing.
Toby had tried to persuade them that the future didn’t always have to be like the past, in fact, that it shouldn’t be, that novelty kept the world from growing stale and robotic. His father, though, held his ground tenaciously, arguing that life best known was life best lived. At last, driven to exasperation, Toby pointed out in a caustic voice that not all the men of the family had graduated from Ole Miss. His father had frozen, rigid and immobile; his mother had groaned.
The boy raved on. They were not living in 1850, and he was not one of his great-great-grandfather’s slaves. He would do as he pleased, and what pleased him was to go to Stanford. To hell with Ole Miss and business management. The whole house could burn to the ground for all he cared.
His father exploded. He bellowed at his son, accusing him of ingratitude, of thanklessness. The son yelled at his father, charging him with small-minded tyranny. His mother tried to come between them, but neither of them even acknowledged her, and she retired from the battlefield, leaving them to settle things themselves.
As dawn came, Toby stalked out. He went to California and enrolled in Stanford. He met a fellow student who filled his days with laughter and his nights with excitement, and after a few months, they married. When he completed his master’s degree, he graduated second in his class, and received job offers from all over the globe. He and Beth spent several weeks jetting around the world, checking on the different locations. After much discussion, they agreed on Beth’s home town of Tucson; they both loved the desert heat and the coolness of the mountains, the hiking and the freedom, the plants and the animals. They bought a small adobe home on the side of a hill in the shadow of the Santa Catalina Mountains, surrounded by saguaro and sage. And there they stayed till summoned to the funeral.
Toby looks again at the book in his lap. He wonders why his father had brought it down from its place on the shelf, had opened it to that particular page, an accounting of slaves. Why would he be looking over the old records of those bound to the family? Those yoked to his ancestors? Could it be that since he had no hope of ever leaving the family, he might consider himself a slave, too? How else is slavery defined? If no man is an island, if any man’s death diminishes our lives, doesn’t any man’s bondage diminish our liberty? As much as Toby values freedom, might not his father yearn for his own?
In the dark library, Toby sits, waiting for his father, but not to confront him. He waits to let him know that though he can’t yet forgive him, at least he now has a better understanding of him. Of them both. He waits to agree with him, to admit that even if science could calculate the movement of every marble, the path of every atom, the trajectory of every quark in the universe, even then no one could predict the spin and gyrations of the human heart.
The clock in the hallway strikes half past ten. In the darkness, the door opens.
* * *
