I, too, was different when my mother wasn’t around.
Not far outside of Tapington, he turned to me and said, in what sounded like an amused voice, “Do you know who Knudson Hay is?”
“No.”
“He was my boss at Princeton. There’s a conference at the U of M, and he’s coming out for it.”
“So?”
“Well, he’s going to drive up afterwards and stop by the cabin.”
“Well, that’s nice, I guess.”
He looked back at the road.
“I’m wondering,” he said, “if I should tell your mother.”
—
AT DUSK, WHEN we reached Tapington, my roll was still jackrabbiting around inside me. My father opened the front door of the house and led me in. Here we were, just the two of us, in a hallway as cool and still as a mausoleum.
I suddenly understood that the family who had lived here was dead.
The winter coats in the tiny closet were their mummies. A tall father, gruff and oblivious, dandruff pasted to his shoulders. A short mother, diligent and cheerful, her red rainboots pressed together. Two teenagers, poorly fit to the world. Folded Kleenex in the girl’s pockets. Powdery traces in the boy’s.
A broken umbrella on the floor by the door. Wobbly chairs in the kitchen. More clues. An orderly existence had begun to fail. As we stepped through the echoing halls, bits became clearer. The buoyant mother’s efforts had in the end proved insufficient. Onward we went, through the cramped rooms. The smell of dust on drapes. The sourness of mold from the cellar door. Side by side above the mantel in the living room hung two old oil paintings, one of a barn and one of a stormy sea. The other walls were covered with faded prints of famous art — Fra Angelico, Caravaggio, Monet, Mondrian, Escher, Picasso — the history of Western civilization in counterclockwise order, pausing for the chimney.
These poor people.
My father had disappeared upstairs. When I arrived in the bedroom he was tearing through the closet, heaping clothes into a pile. Then he gave up and strode all the way down to the basement. Furniture shifted. Boxes thudded against the concrete. When he returned, he was dragging behind him the unattached sections of a wooden ladder. He joined them together, leaned the frame up against the trapdoor in the ceiling, and ascended into the attic.
More scraping. He appeared at the opening with a box in his hands. “Where does time go?” he asked.
“Depends on velocity.”
“Ah,” he said, climbing down. “I’ve raised a theoretician.”
“What’s in the box?”
“Something I made.” He set it on the rug, broke the tape, and began lifting out parts. “When I was in school.”
“What is it?”
“It’s called a quatrant.”
As he joined it together, it became obvious that not all the pieces would fit. He joined several at the rim and a few along the struts, but the dovetails and the sliding joints had all shrunk or cracked, and he couldn’t close the radius.
“When I made this,” he said, “I was in the midst of the most hopeful period of my life, but I was tormented by a problem. I thought that if I devoted myself to it, no matter how difficult it turned out to be, then my devotion would reveal the truth.”
“And now?”
“I think that the problem was the only thing that allowed me to exist.”
—
WE LEFT THE next morning before dawn, the Country Squire piled high with our take. Tied-off garbage bags and rolled-up sheets, all of them filled with the things from Mom’s list. Her summer coat hung from a hook over the back door, and three pairs of her shoes were wrapped in dish towels inside the spaghetti pot, which sat atop its own lid next to a taped-up box of cooking utensils. Beside it all lay the quatrant, its parts rolled into a blanket. I could barely see out the rear window.
Dad was in an expansive mood. As he drove, he talked. He told me about how he’d first gotten the idea for a quatrant from a book he’d found as a graduate student. For years, a man named Tycho Brahe had used a quatrant to record every single incremental change in the position of the heavens above his attic in Denmark. He sipped at his soda. “And do you know what came of it?”
“No,” I said.
He looked over. “Nothing, Hans. Nothing at all.”
The sun was just beginning to rise. His thin smile became a parenthesis of thought. After a moment, he said, “Actually, that’s not true. What came of it were the Rudolphine tables.”
I turned and watched a pickup truck drag a cloud of dust through a field.
“The Rudolphine tables were his life’s work. They were his signature accomplishment. A record of every celestial body in the sky.” He glanced over again. “Listen to me, please.”
“I am.”
“They surpassed the Alphonsine tables in every way. They were a thousand times more accurate.” He reached his hand back and touched the rolled blanket. “The Rudolphine tables were a masterpiece. They ended the Ptolemaic system and brought about the heliocentric one. They were the beginning of modern astronomy.”
For a few moments I considered his words. “Then why have I never heard of him?”
“Because he only collected the data, Hans. He never actually published it. Do you know who finally did?”
“Tell me.”
He turned and looked at me significantly. “Kepler. Kepler published Brahe’s data.”
We were in the rolling farmland now at the northern edge of the till plain. I’d not yet taken my dose. The hour was still early and the road stretched before us toward the brightening horizon. My father was driving twenty miles an hour over the speed limit.
“Kepler started as Brahe’s student, but then he became his rival. And in the end, he killed his old master.” He shook his head. “By disproving the Tychonic theory.”
“Okay.”
“Just like that, one man was dead and another was ascendant. Brahe knew that the planets circled the sun, but he was stuck on the idea that the sun circled the earth.”
“He was close, I guess. It was a reasonable idea for the time.”
He looked over. “He got it wrong, Hans.”
“Obviously. But he was on the right track.”
I could feel his gaze.
“Nobody cares if you’re close, Hans. Brahe was blinded. That’s why he missed it.”
I looked out the window.
“Listen to me.”
“I am.”
“It wasn’t even that he hadn’t thought of the possibility. He had thought of it. But he insisted that the earth couldn’t be in orbit around the sun, because”—here he paused to smile—“because if it had been, the stars would have exhibited a parallax.”
“And they didn’t?”
Now his look was disdainful. “Yes, of course they did. How else could it be?” He opened his window and spat.
“Well—”
“Brahe just flat out ignored it. If the earth was the thing that was moving, he knew that a parallax had to be there. He knew it would be maximized at six months’ orbit. His own student was humiliating him. They were both looking straight at a parallax, and they both took the observations, and yet one of them failed to see it. It was obviously there.”
“Maybe it was too small for his instruments.”
“Well, it wasn’t. It was just ignored. Brahe somehow convinced himself that it wasn’t there.” He cleared his throat. “Hope overcoming reason.”
“It’s not so bad to be hopeful.”
“You’ve been talking to your mother.” He leaned across the seat. “Tycho Brahe clung to a lousy idea, Hans. That’s all it was. People like us — you must know this by now — we can’t do that. We know damn well when we’re right. We know a long time before anyone else even suspects it.” He cleared his throat. “Or when we’re wrong. That’s how we live. That’s how we die.”