needed little sleep, and she felt no fear of wandering the streets, either in San Francisco or in Vallejo, which was a lively, tough town, full of sailors and shipbuilders and foreigners. “Well, darling,” she told Margaret, “I have a little something in my pocket. A last resort. Never had to try it except one night in Rome, with a gang of boys. They ran off in the end. If I need it, I will use it.” Margaret was sure this was a pistol of some kind. A Missourian never minded a pistol, even a woman from St. Louis.
THE moon book had been a failure, according to Andrew. Yes, it had been published, and yes, it had been reviewed, mostly favorably, in The Astronomical Journal and Scientific American, and in Science, itself, as well as an obscure German journal and three newspapers. But the Attraction Theory had failed to displace the flaming-cucumber theory. “Drama is what they want, my dear,” said Andrew. The Attraction Theory had not gotten him off the island and over to Berkeley or down to Pasadena or back to Chicago, and he was restless, day and night. Another thing Margaret did not say to Dora was that their grief, hers for Alexander and Andrew’s for his moon book, did not make them more sympathetic to each other, but less. Their lives were mostly private now, lived side by side as necessary, but whatever there had been for them both—in the earthquake or the moon book or their hopes for Alexander—had dissipated the way certain qualities of light did. The reason she didn’t mention it was that Dora would have said, as the ladies in her knitting group would have said, what did she expect? Did she not know what marriage was? But she didn’t, did she? Except from listening to Lavinia’s tales of those early days, when she had only sons and no daughters.
Andrew published another article in The Astronomical Journal, the first since the article about the craters. It was nothing about the moon—rather, he had rustled up his sets of double-star observations, made in Mexico so long ago, and he had attempted to coordinate these with observations made by other astronomers before and since, and to use the observations to propose a universe in which double stars were more common than single stars. The solar system, he thought, might be the remains of the sun’s former double. Although the mass of all the planets and their moons and the debris between Mars and Jupiter that had been (Andrew was certain) a planet was less than the mass of a star that would have equaled and balanced the sun, the difference could be accounted for by time and attrition. All of this sounded plausible to Margaret. Everyone knew the sort of effort it took to maintain a stable partnership, and why should stars be different from married people?
On the whole, the reception of this article was positive, and two or three astronomers, plus a Mr. Akenbourn in South Africa, wrote him admiring letters.
Then, one day (it was July, because Margaret was in the kitchen making strawberry jam and thinking about Lavinia, who had died at Christmas, and whom Margaret had seen only once since leaving Missouri, when Elizabeth and the girls had brought her out for a month’s visit; the visit hadn’t been terribly easy, with the girls only seven and five and Lavinia visibly failing; it had, in fact, been a sad and difficult visit, but Margaret was thinking about how to persuade Elizabeth to come again, grueling trip though it was; Lucy May was nine already, and Eloise, seven), she heard the shattering of a window. She stood stock-still in surprise, then went to Andrew’s door and knocked. No response. She opened the door.
Andrew was red in the face and breathing hard. After the article appeared, Andrew had spent some of his money on a typewriter, and begun another project, much more important than the moon book. The typewriter was not easy to use, but it appealed to his pleasure in innovation. He attempted to master it off and on, though he railed against the arrangement of the keyboard, which had not been done according to any scientific principles that he could see. The typewriter had gone through the window and was lying out on the grass.
She said, “Did the—,” but just then he picked up a copy of The Astronomical Journal and threw it down on the desk. She saw that he