were at school, and Captain Lear was expected home any day. Mrs. Lear knew what she was getting at as soon as she said the words “private papers.” Mrs. Lear laughed. “Goodness me!” she exclaimed. “Why should a husband’s affairs be private from his wife? He might easily find himself embroiled in more and more difficulties. I’m sure your mother would tell you the same thing. Do you know Mrs. Rudolph? Perhaps not. Captain Rudolph was”—she leaned forward and lowered her voice—“court-martialed. They lived in the third house down. Dorothy Rudolph kept finding objects about the house, bejeweled daggers and carved jade boxes and such, and she didn’t have the sense to investigate their origins. She didn’t even look into Captain Rudoph’s bank book, just held out her hand once a week for household funds. He was stealing these things! Very strange. She might have stopped him, but she didn’t understand her conjugal responsibilities. My goodness, Margaret! If there are papers to look into or drawers to open, then do it while you have the time.”
And so she opened and looked into.
After Andrew graduated from college at Columbia, some fifty miles from their town, he went away to the University of Berlin, in Germany—everyone in town knew this, because it redounded to the credit of the entire county. Andrew wrote, “But, dearest Mother, if you think more deeply about the matter, you will see that there is nothing for me at an American institution. It almost doesn’t matter what ‘work rumor has done against’ me—the resources your preferred institutions put into mathematics, or astronomy, or even the sciences, altogether, are laughable when not shameful.” And then, from Berlin, he wrote, “They do think I am brilliant, dearest Mother. They do exclaim at how quickly I have picked up the language and the customs. They do admire the precision of my observations, but of course, they are hide-bound in their way, and very German and very Jewish, some of them. They stick together. I am endeavoring to remember, as you say, that all people stick with their own kind. And I am doing as you also bid me: I am NOT voicing everything I think, and I am not letting my temper get the best of me, even late at night, and I AM watching what I drink, because, as you say, it is evident that drink affects ANGLO-SAXONS somewhat differently than it affects GERMANS. Even so, they expected, they now say, to find once they got to know me, that I was ARMED at all times!”
The letters from Germany were not as numerous as those from Columbia—“Darling Mother, my studies so enthrall me that weeks go by without my realizing. Just to illustrate, I said to my friend Mauritz the other day, ‘Isn’t it about time for Easter?’ And he laughed and explained that it was already three weeks since Easter, and had I not noticed that he was away visiting his family in Düsseldorf for five days around that time?”
Andrew was industrious about seeking out mentors—“I have been to England and met George Darwin! He was most kind to me, even after I told him (politely, dearest Mother!) that I question some of his findings, but he said to me, ‘That is what young men do, Early! Question you must, and if the old men fume and fuss, you must not pay a bit of mind.’ I consider our meeting to have been a great success, but though I have written three letters to him since, I have not received a reply.” He made at least four trips about Europe, meeting or attempting to meet astronomers he admired.
Margaret had thought Darwin’s first name was Charles; undoubtedly there was another one. She dared not ask, though.
There was one letter that he sent his mother not long after her famous trip to Baden, where he joined her for a month. In this letter he remarked that “Miss Maria Meyerhoff and Miss Meyerhoff seem to have gone away without a word of farewell,” but there was nothing to indicate the extent of his relationship to either of the girls, and, indeed, whether they were German, English, or American. The Meyerhoff sisters were not mentioned again, nor was any other girl. She winced a little at how these encounters might have gone, with Andrew so big and intent and frank-spoken, but it was no business of hers, was it? None of this was any business of hers, no matter what Mrs. Lear said,