"Okay." He laid his brush aside. A half-finished drawing was in front of him; others were spread out to dry on the table. They were delicate pen sketches with a wash of sepia: faces, floating hair, oak leaves. "What are those for?" she asked.
"Christmas cards." He scrawled his name at the bottom of a letter, picked up another one.
"Oh, my. I wish I could do that."
"Can't draw?"
"No. I can draw a pig, and that's about all."
"Let me see your pig." He pushed a blank card toward her.
"I don't want to spoil this."
"That's all right, there are plenty more."
Margaret took the pen he gave her and made a pig: a sort of bucket shape on its side for the head, then a round body, four stick legs, and a curlicue for the tail.
Gene looked at it without comment. "Would you like to make some cards? I'll show you a way without drawing."
"Yes, I'd love to."
"Get rid of these letters and I'll meet you in the dining room."
When she got there, Gene was spreading newspapers over one end of the table. When he was finished, he began taking jars of paint out of a shopping bag. "This is tempera -- it'll wash off, but it's messy. Get me some spoons from the kitchen, will you, and some little bowls, and a glass of water."
"How many spoons?"
"Half a dozen."
Gene arranged the open paint jars, bowls, and spoons in the middle of the table. "Sit down and I'll show you what to do. First you fold a card in half, like this. Then you drop a little paint on it, wherever you want." He dipped up some red with a spoon, then blue, then a few drops of yellow. The paint stood up in biobs on the shiny white card. "Now you just fold it over." He demonstrated, pressing the card down vigorously with the heel of his hand.
He opened the card. The paint had spread and run together in a symmetrical winged shape; there were veins in it and subtle shadings where the colors had blended.
"My goodness, that's beautiful!" Margaret said.
"Try it."
Her first attempt made a sort of cabbage shape with yellow eyes. She tried again, with different colors, and got an orchid. Gene was mixing colors in one of the bowls to make a brownish violet. He spooned some of this onto a folded card, then added a little water. When he opened it, it was a veined brown-violet shape, like a block print, with delicate traceries around it. "Oh, let me try that," she said.
Irma wandered in after a while, then Pongo, then Linck, and they all sat around the table until nearly dinner time, making Christmas cards. As the colors dried, new patterns became visible in them. "Look at this rabbit," they said to each other, or, "Here's a demon standing over a tree." When they counted them, they discovered they had made more than a hundred cards, each more beautiful than the others.
Later Margaret said, "I know I can't draw, and I certainly can't paint. So where did the beauty come from?"
"Well, folding the card makes the design symmetrical, of course, and that's part of what we mean by beauty. Then the colors mixing on the card gave you all kinds of subtle gradations, and the surface tension of the paint made it form veins and so on. Remember that you chose the colors, and where to put them; that makes your cards different from anybody else's."
"Yes, I saw that. Irma's are big splashy flowers, and yours are like misty watercolors."
"Sure. And Piet's are dark and brooding because he uses so much black. So don't say you didn't do it, because you really did. But the rest of it came from just the physical properties of the paint and the card -- if that's beautiful, it's because the universe is beautiful."
"Like the coquinas?"
"Maybe."
"But what's it for? Just for our benefit?"
"I don't think so. There's beauty in the universe that nobody ever saw until the invention of the microscope. Crack open a stone, or split a piece of wood, and you'll see beauty. But what if you never cracked that stone, or split that piece of wood?"
"Isn't that a little like, if a tree falls in the forest when nobody's there, is there a sound?"
"Well, is there? Depends on what you mean by sound. If it's just waves of compression and rarefaction in the air, then the answer is yes -- if it's what you experience when those waves hit your ear, then the answer is no. A long time ago I used to think that when we make art we're celebrating the natural world, praising it, and that's what it's all about. What I think now is that we're here because we can make a kind of beauty the universe can't make by itself. The natural world can make a crystal, or an ocelot, or a poplar tree with the wind blowing through it, but it can't make a painting, or music, or stories. And there's a kind of beauty that we create in intellectual things, maybe -- mathematics, physics."
"You don't think that's just there, and we're discovering it?"
"Oh, no. Mathematicians will tell you that mathematics is not descriptive except by coincidence. It isn't a science. And even physics -- somebody, I think it was Leon Cooper, once said that when God created the world, he didn't bother to make any fine structure. A tree was just a tree, until somebody cut one down, and then he had to hurry up and create the rings and so on. And when somebody invented a microscope, he had to create all the fine structure that you can't see with your naked eye -- cells and corpuscles and bacteria. And when we invented more and more powerful instruments for looking at the insides of atoms, of course he had to make electrons and protons and neutrons. And now it's quarks and !eptons and so forth, and that's why particle physics is such a mess, because God is making it all up as he goes along."
Chapter Twenty-two
Tom Cooley left his job in 1976, moved back to Amherst where he still had friends, and retired on a small pension. With this and his income from several rental properties he had acquired in the sixties, he was financially secure, and for a number of years his health was good. He went on annual hunting trips with his cronies, did a little fishing and continued to read "Amusement Business" from cover to cover.
In the fall of 1982, camped in the Adirondacks, one evening he felt tired and out of sorts. The next morning he missed a clear shot at a six-point buck; the gun seemed to dip in his hands at the moment he squeezed the trigger. On the way back to camp with his friends, he slipped and fell heavily. The next day he noticed that he was having trouble holding things. When he tried to chop some kindling, the hatchet flew out of his hand and narrowly missed Al Jacobs' leg.
Cooley realized that something was seriously wrong. When he got back to Amherst he went to a doctor, who sent him to a V.A. hospital for tests. In December the doctor told him, "Mr. Cooley, what you've got is something called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. You may have heard of it as Lou Gehrig's disease. It's a progressive muscular weakness, and there just isn't any treatment for it. I'm sorry to tell you this, but that's the way it looks."
"How long have I got?" Cooley asked.
"I'd say three or four years, five at the outside."
A few months after this interview, Cooley found a notice in the back of "Amusement Business": "Big John Kimberley would like to hear from carnival friends, 1964-65." There was a box number in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Cooley's hands were now so weak that he could see the time coming when he would not be able to dress and feed himself. His legs were also affected; he could not walk far without tiring. Dr. Seward had been after him to go into the V.A. hospital again, but Cooley knew that once he did that he would never get out again.
There was no way he could aim and fire a gun, or use any other weapon. He thought of letter bombs, but that was too chancy; someone else might open the letter. He thought of poisons, of fire, of bacterial cultures, and rejected them all. He slept badly. In his dreams, Gene Anderson was guillotined, drowned, garroted, crushed by falling trees, and always he stood up again unharmed.