“Yes, that’s it. It is always teatime, and we’ve no time to wash the things between the whiles.”
Time is a pet topic here at the Sisters’—in some curious sense, the only topic — though I haven’t fully realized that yet.
On this particular Wednesday — a slow night for the Sisters, I gather — only thirty-seven people have shown up for dinner, so there is plenty left over for us. When I praise the leek stew to the one who looks like Mildred Pierce, her head turns with a jerk, and I find myself in the considerable heat of her attention.
“We are discussing the ‘grandmother paradox,’ Miss Didion. Do you know what this paradox means?”
I believe it has to do with time travel of some kind, I reply.
“Time travel into the past,” says Enzian. “The grandmother paradox is the primary objection to such travel. Summarize, Gustavo, if you please.”
Gustavo, who turns out to be the nice young man from Uruguay, and who describes himself to me, later that same evening, as a “forensic physicist,” leans gracefully forward.
“A man chrononavigates into the past, to a time before his parents were conceived. This man, by chance or design, sets a chain of events in motion that results in the death of his grandmother. Does our chrononaut himself cease to exist?”
“Gracías, Geraldo.”
“De nada, maestra.”
The table grows quiet. It’s clear that I’m expected to respond. I’ve had a number of gin-and-hot-waters by this point in the evening, so I ask why the poor little grandmother has been singled out for destruction. Why not the time traveler’s mother, for example? Come to think of it, why not his father?
Gustavo considers my question. “Quién sabe,” he says. “Too sentimental?”
“That is not here or there,” Enzian cuts in. “The objection has always been that these two realities — the reality containing the chrononaut, and the reality in which he has been extinquished — cannot both exist, and yet they must both exist. The chrononaut has to exist in order to extinguish himself; but as soon as the deed is accomplished, he must therefore vanish.”
I acknowledge that this would seem to pose a problem.
“But there is a solution,” she says, laying her mannish hands flat on the table. “Paradoxes ought not to exist — but they continue to do so, despite our objections. Some even exist physically: for example, the Möbius strip.” She pauses briefly here, assessing me. “The Möbius strip, Miss Didion, shows us how effortlessly the universe can accommodate incompatible realities. We can stare at a Möbius strip, hold it in our hands and examine it, and still refuse to understand what we are seeing.”
The conversation is tending toward the metaphysical, someone observes.
“Allow me to quote from Ouspensky,” a bespectacled negro says suavely. “‘What does “metaphysics” mean, ultimately, but physics considered from a place above?’”
At this point things start to get lively.
“You must bring your ideas to the world,” my Montevidean acquaintance urges. “Take them to Princeton — to the Institute for Advanced Study. Oppenheimer is there. He may listen.”
“I have no interest in the opinions of that death fetishist,” Enzian snaps. “My father had no dealings with Dr. Oppenheimer, and neither shall I.”
For a while no one speaks. At the far end of the table a man with a grizzled gray beard is slurping Chablis out of what appears to be a soup tureen. He is later identified for me, by my husband, as an editor of the “Partisan Review.”
“Your duty is to make your findings public,” Geraldo insists. “Don’t let the scientific mainstream seal your lips. Tesla didn’t. Ouspensky didn’t.”
“Tesla died in a Fifty-Fourth Street flophouse,” the negro observes. “Ouspensky died in a basement in Surrey, neglected and anemic and alone.”
Enzian shakes her head. “If the world wants me, gentlemen, it knows where to find me. I’ll be happy to receive it here, in my home, on the second Wednesday evening of the month.”
LaMont rolls his eyes at this, and Jessup shifts uncomfortably in his seat.
No one else says a word. It seems a pathetic statement, textbook megalomania, the ravings of a bush-league Caligari.
In a certain sense, of course, it was all of these things; but in another, truer sense, it was not. Twenty-five years have passed since that statement was made. It was the humid late summer of 1969, and a great many things that seemed febrile that August now strike us as perfectly sane. The world has finally come, two and a half decades later, to see the Tolliver Sisters in their home. We stare, all of us, at the blurred photographs in the Times and the Post, and consider the evidence closely, from every available angle. And still we refuse to understand what we are seeing.
In his windowless cubby in Cheektowaga, meanwhile, Orson was tucking his magnum opus into bed. The novel had taken him longer than he’d expected — much longer — but he wasn’t complaining. Lopsided and inelegant though it was, it pleased him in a way no writing of his had ever done before. It was a book, for one thing — not just grist for the pulps. It might even make him some money.
More and more clearly, as he whittled and buffed, Orson came to see his novel as a paean to Reason. How he’d managed to be born into a family that approached science the way a witch doctor approaches medicine he had no idea, but he was resolved, more than ever, to go his own way. His plan was twofold. He would serve as an example, by living according to Reason’s dictates, as an Ayatollah lives by the Koran; and he would spell out his beliefs, in his novel, for the whole world to see — if it was willing to put in just a little effort.
As you can see, Mrs. Haven, he was thinking like a cult leader already.
He’d gotten into the habit of taking books down at random from the parlor bookcase at Pine Ridge Road, and in a clothbound edition of the poems of Sir Richard Francis Burton (which had almost certainly been Sonja’s) he found a couplet that would soon become his personal motto, and be printed on the frontispiece of The Excuse:
Do what thy manhood bids thee do,
from none but self expect applause;
He noblest lives and noblest dies
who makes and keeps his self-made laws.
Below this, in Greek (it was that kind of novel), was a distinctly more appropriate epigraph:
ώρα κάνει ανόητοι όλων μας
Which, loosely translated into English, means
Time makes fools of us all.
“I’m finished,” Orson told Ursula one evening. “At least I think I am. Christ, I hope so.”
They were lying together in the second room on the right at the top of the stairs. Although it was drafty — it was drafty everywhere in that house — they were both sweating lightly. Ursula lay flat on her back, still a bit short of breath, smiling one of her classic equivocal smiles. She took hold of his ear and pinched it.
“You’ve been finished before,” she said.
“This time is different.”
“You’ve said that before, too.”