XXXII

Not far from the links, lives Professor Cock-A-Doodle-Do with his unmarried daughter.

"A golf course right outside our back door, almost. That's what Dorothea had said when she first talked me into buying this little house. I couldn't really see it, when the university was willing to give us a place right up there on the hill. But Dorothea prevailed. Yes sir, that she did. A golf course right outside our back door, almost. Funny thing. I never did much take to golf. Wasn't my sport."

It is the sixth time he has repeated the tale of Dorothea's prevalence and his lack of all interest in the game of golf to a waning Dana. They are sitting side by side on the green-and-red plaid couch, an electric heater making soft hisses in the grate, and though the small room reeks of heat, he is buried beneath a thick brown blanket, and when he offers Dana a corner of it, she gratefully accepts.

The daughter has tendered cups of cocoa crowned with Marshmallow Fluff, her favorite drink, her sweet tooth still, in middle age, insatiable. Her love of goodies has swollen her small frame, the buttons of her purple wooly vest are strained, and there is an invisible wisp of Fluff gracing her top lip. She is no student of her face, her long dark hair, streaked with wide bands of white, is pinned back with green plastic ornaments in the shape of bunnies, she has no vanity.

She has poetry, however. Upstairs, in the little student desk of pressed pine, is a stack of exquisite poems, perfected over the years, until they have been reduced down to bare astonishments.

Drs. Krebs and Mallach sit side by side, sharing the brown blanket, while the daughter sits in a chair across but near, so that if they leaned forward and reached, they could all touch hands, and between them is a low table on which the cups of cocoa are placed, with only the daughter's drunk down, and lying beside the cocoa are the papers emblazoned with equations.

She has tried to explain it to Professor Cock-A-Doodle-Do and he has listened quietly, nodding his massive head every now and then with what she hopes is understanding. She has tried to explain only the gist of it to Josiah Krebs, and his eyes are bright behind the bottle-thick lenses, they seem to glow with a gnomish omniscience so that she takes heart, she takes inspiration, and she speaks brilliantly of the final form, diaphanously lit and irresistible, her strength holding out until near the end, until now the end, the physics deep inside her, a displacement inside her own body.

— They none of them felt it in just that way. Dana feels it, too, of course. That you know.

— Yes.

And then it is quite gone, the bliss fled from her face, all the warm colors bled from her face, and she collapses into passive weariness, awaiting the final word, prepared to take whatever it is that will come from the little ancient man of science.

"I liked the golf course most of all in the winter when Dorothea and I would just step into our snowshoes and go gliding right out our back door. Funny thing. I never did much take to golf. Wasn't my sport."

"It's very important what you've solved here. It's quite immense, isn't it?"

It's the daughter who is asking, her voice emphatically un-poetical, almost gruff, and with diction rough around the edges. One could never infer from it the susceptibilities and intimations she holds inside, never deduce the astonishments that lie in a drawer upstairs.

She has sat in a quiet rapture, and Dana, concentrating hard on our equations, has barely taken in the presence of the heavy face suffused with unidentifiable emotion.

Dana turns at the question to the daughter, and sees the eyes alit behind the black-framed glasses.

"Yes, it's quite immense. It was a collaborative effort, though. I hardly solved it by myself. I've sent it out to a few of the leading journals, but I haven't much faith that they'll take it. The approach is so at odds with the orthodox view, they'll dismiss it as impossible, I think."

"The impossible has a tendency to go among us unseen."

"That's why I wanted to explain it to your father tonight. I wanted to be certain that someone other than myself understood it."

"I see," the daughter answers, quiet for several moments, with only the heater hissing. "And who are the other collaborators, if I may ask?"

"My father, who was Samuel Mallach." And there it is still, in her erupting smile and her voice. She cannot say the name without the vast love of him emerging. "Your father knows of him."

"Samuel Mallach, you say?"

Josiah Krebs, sunk low under the covers, gives one sharp decisive shake of his hanging head.

"No, I don't seem to recall any such name. Was he someone from Olympia?"

"No, not from Olympia."

"I wouldn't have known him, then. I've spent my entire professional life right here, young lady. If he wasn't from Olympia, then I wouldn't have known him."

And she is smiling still, contented, a gentle smile for every turn of the gyre.

"It must have been wonderful to be able to collaborate with your own father," the daughter says, leaning forward in her lumpy pants. She has the look of women one sees waiting at bus stations and other cruel places, pasty under the fluorescent lights, worn out with waiting, except for her eyes, their held hue and life and light and sight.

"Yes, it was."

— I've been thinking—

— Yes?—

— The wave function—

— Yes, Dana, what?

"There was another collaborator as well. Justin Childs. The form of the solution is entirely his. It's all of his essence. So it's under his name that I've sent it out."

"And don't you care at all whether your name is known in connection with work that's so important?"

"Justin Childs," Josiah Krebs says before Dana has the chance to respond, though I know precisely what her answer would have been. But Josiah has gone quite suddenly to quivering alertness, his great yellowish head snapped erect, and he smiles his most conspiratorially gleeful smile across the room and straight at me.

"Will you be OK out there? It's so inhumanly cold. You can spend the night, you know. We'd both like it so much."

The daughter says it shyly at the front door, as Dana is making ready to depart, smiling still. She had bent and kissed the ancient cheeks, her vein of tenderness struck open, and he, momentarily nudged from the tenseless manifold of his distractions, had fixed her with a hard and scrutinizing stare.

"Mmm. I'll be just fine. Thank you so much, but I'll be fine."

And with the vein of one now opened, and with the other who is always bleeding tenderness, the two physicists' daughters embrace, clumsy with the bulky clothes and unplanned motions, so that the poet's black-framed glasses are sent flying from her nose.

The poet daughter stands at the open door, watching until Dana has gotten safely to her car, and only then does she turn back to her father, still smiling gleefully to himself, uncomplaining of the reckless draft from open doors, and she shakes her head in wonder, while Dana is limping past her car and heading straight out for the links.

The wide night skies are blazingly clear, with starlight falling thick and invisible on the snow.

Her eyes cast down, she limps slowly out across the frozen ground, until she finds a branch that lies half-buried and pulls it out. And with the jagged broken limb, she inscribes her father's guiding equation and mine and hers beside it. She writes the physics in the unruined snow, thinking that she has done what she can, she has done more, imparted it to the Olympian physicist and the respected academic editors, and perhaps there is one among them who will understand.

Perhaps even, it suddenly occurs to her now with one last leap of groundless hope, it will be the physicist's daughter. The look of her comes back to Dana now, the caught rapture of her attention. There had been the light of some sort of understanding in her eyes, perhaps it had been scientific, why not hope, one last time, that it was scientific?

But if not the daughter, then perhaps the father or a learned editor, and if not any among these, then at least it is here, written gleaming in the particles of snow.

— There are the eight stars of the enchanted ladder of the fairy girl's hair.

It is Cynthia Rosenthal Childs who is quietly murmuring.

— And there are the stars that were the thorns in her lover's eyes.

It is her husband beside her, Jake Childs, who points out the two dim stars in the northernmost quadrant of Olympia's winter sky.

— The heart at the heart of the heart is full of pity. There is always pity in the equations.

It is Carlotta Mallach, softly brushing the snow from her daughter's blue cheek, who is smiling still, contented.

We are all here, lying beside her beneath the wide night sky, murmuring each to each and reticulating stars.

— In Greek the word for the universe and for beauty are the same.

— Cosmos.

— And what shall I study?

— The same.

Paradox abounding, the cruel edge of the cold lifting as we stare starward in the snow, the cruel edge receding far from her and far from me: a memory of a memory fallen broken from out of time.

She is breathing softly out ... and in, ever more slowly, breathing softly in and ... out, whole minutes in between, with infinities subdued. We lie together, softly murmuring on the links, starstruck and chastened.

— Come, my children, we'll go for a walk. We'll take a walk while there's still some light to catch outside.

It is Samuel Mallach, laughing softly, colliding waves of bliss-sweet laughter, sending a gentle fragrance through the brightness of the clarified night.

And with the fingers of my light, the same with which I brushed the darkness from the leaves and tried to tremble forth the hidden otherness of things, I still the fearful shudder of her passing.

She holds her open palms to me and comes. Slender, as a lotus stem, her eyes wondrously unveiled, she comes.