MILEVA

MILEVA

My diagnosis is the same as my father’s and in spite of thirty-five years spent in circumlocutions, so is the prognosis: Heart failure.

I left town and made more money than the GNP of my birthplace for the first hundred fifty years of its existence, including the value of the land, apple orchards, walnut groves, and chicken farms. More than the apple juice factory, the high school teachers, the post office workers, the telephone linesmen, the mechanics, the dentist, the one doctor, the one vet, and even the family with the mansion on the hill who owned the department store and who’s son died young in a drunken collision.

“Told you it would bite you in the ass, just like me”, my dad would say if he were still alive. He would mean the town. My dad’s name was Martin, but his whole life he was called Marty. His mouth looked like a sprung trap, and his lips were squeezed bloodless. He had a snappy temper, and he may have been an example of what childhood biters grow up to be. There is always one for each grammar school class, an untamed, scary, scared kid every one avoids. “You’ll see”, he told me when I returned, “this place will rise up and bite you on the ass”, and maybe he was warning me about himself, even apologizing for being my father. Inevitably, buried in my heart, he would rise up like a sleeping dog and bite me in the ass.

I directed and produced a series of films that took place in a galaxy far, far away, and returned with a billion smackeroos. I started buying up the town’s boonies to launch my own special effects studio that would ease live bodies out of the cinema universe. I purchased a hundred thousand acres. I corrupted neighbors and they fell like dominoes. Within the borders of my land is a remnant of an old highway system, three crossroads with their abandoned gas station and one general store. They have been used as sets in several films, but for the most part I am the only one who visits them. I roll out an old Shwinn clunker from my office on the studio lot and pedal down those ragged tar strips, chasing the summer doldrums, and in the snuff of dried stalks and oak dander, re-do a days adventure in my twelve year old life when these old buildings at the shank end of the decade were already abandoned, but their paint had yet to blister, red oil rags still smelled gloriously of escape and errantry, and I imagined shipwrecks in the yellow weal, and spent the day in the promise of solitude.

But, that five-mile stretch of road is not my “Rosebud”. For that you must look to the Viegeleh Farm. When I die it will become California State Property. A trust I have endowed will preserve it in perpetuity. I have spent roughly two million to track down objects of such negligible intrinsic value that those unleashed to sniff them out in collapsed barns and rural dumps earn a hundred thousand a year and expenses, and even with that outlay as incentive, still so disregarded were these things that their time in the world has passed into daydream and I must pay other crews from the studio whose work is weaving light and cobwebs into celluloid another half-million to summon them from my memory. Enshrined on this chicken farm will be a leather bound WilsonJones three column ledger. It is meant to be there and I will return it. I’m the one who removed it over forty years ago when Albert Viegelah died. It contains the Unified Field theorem he had been working on for the last several decades of his life, and it is also a nearly complete record, invoices included, of his chicken farm, which is how I became acquainted with it when invited to add some entries for myself. I read it first when I was fifteen and since then re-read it at the threshold of each new decade in my life. It has made and destroyed me six times and I plan it for my last rites after which it will regain its place among the other foundling objects on Viegelah’s farm, the hurdy-gurdy with its sad and frightening little bell-hop uniform tailored for a monkey, the stereoscope, the magic lantern with its carousel of a Viennese street, and the pipe organ whose stops and pedals was conventional but produced notes with a helix shaped rotor that blew breathy notes from flute and shimmering ones from chimes.

How is it that I have this book?

My father worked in the feed store. He wore several administrative hats, bookkeeper, inventory manager, and sales supervisor. The owner, Mr. Giles, was fully employed at being old; he arrived at seven and began his perennial snooze. The lumping and custodial work were done by Mexicans, and if you deduct Mr. Giles sawing logs in his leather desk chair and the cashier, my dad in his overalls represented the white collars, still, he wore overalls to demean himself. He had begun working there during the Depression when it was a godsend. He answered Uncle Sam’s greetings while still working there, having passed through his teens in the warehouse, and disappointed himself beyond redemption by climbing the same loading dock stairs on his return that he had descended on his way to the Navy. He found that the feed store had kept the cloth gloves he had melodramatically removed as if they had been calf skin and he ready for a fight, better judges of his character than he proved to be when he set off. He never made it to sea, but spent the war in a transshipment warehouse in a Kansas City rail yard where everyone else fixed themselves up for the end of hostilities by stealing crates and selling them on the black market. He never had the nerve and made himself suffer for his cowardice, convinced that famous fortunes had begun there, though in fact he never heard of any of those guys again. But, certainly it had happened elsewhere and it was a sorry comment on his co-workers that they had the gumption but not the brains to bring it off. He relayed these stories to me as a family curse. Father and son were doomed to honest labor, and would be rewarded according to our true virtue: poor in character, poor in pocket.

By fourteen the time to begin prosecuting this curse could no longer be delayed. I tripped the snare myself with the gleam in my eye for a car. Nothing in my time and country so certainly placed a teenager on the assembly line to wage slave as his tangled affairs with a car. Though I have lost sight of my dad merry, his sneer is indelible as he told me I was promised to Viegelah-“a world class mind and chicken farmer”. I was indentured for a car.

I had briefly met Viegelah a couple of years before, when I was twelve, and I still blushed at the mention of his name, something I thought my dad noticed and the reason he had offered me to Viegelah instead of any number of other “chicken shits”, as he called them. My dad boasted of his conversations with the inventor of modern physics; they were on equal footing, maybe my dad even had the advantage since whatever Viegelah knew still left him with guano on his boots. But, maybe, that’s why they got along so well; Viegelah liked talking with him, waiting on the loading dock until my dad came out when he could have paid up and left. It was a meeting of the minds, the man who had put the stars through their paces and the feedlot bookkeeper: The universe boils down to manure.

I remembered that introduction of two years before. My dad sidled over to Viegelah like a nervous crow. My dad had the bully’s cowardice, powerful men made him act servile, and I would watch sadly, ashamed for both of us at his donning of grand eloquent manners and inflated vocabulary. Twelve years old and still untouched by puberty, still wearing my mother’s looks and at the peak of childhood, adept at a boy’s skills, and in love, already for years but having only recently discovered it and with it, eternity as eternal loss. A tragic figure on that day and more tragic for that moment’s intuition of futility, that as my father’s son I was unsuited for longing, that it was no different than his adopted manners, that for both of us were imitations of fineness that began with bitterness. And that was how Viegelah first saw me. He put his knotty hand on my dad’s shoulder and herded him towards me, and his old man’s eyes looked like a couple of plums in a plum tree, as incongruous as ripe fruit is on an old tree. He had my father introduce him, it was for the chance to continue keeping me in eye, literally as I was to discover over the years, because a few people and all true lovers for at least a full orbit of Venus, hold you in their eyes and reflect back to you the longing they hold. “Your father is my good friend, and a little of the professor to me. I am glad to make your acquaintance, George, your father can be proud of you.” For a minute, I think my dad was, and I felt a ray of hope for both of us, and thought of Claire.

I wanted a 1952 Buick. I own three fully restored ones now, a victory as hollow as their empty interiors. It was an odd car for a teen-ager to covet. It sported a metal visor over the front windshield and a spotlight above the left mirror that the driver could aim with an interior handle that had a white plastic grip, but other than these racy seductions it was a plump, stodgy dowager. Chevys and Fords were more the rapiers of the road, especially the more recent models fielded by 1959, the year I went to work for Viegelah, and they were the ambition of most teenage boys. A banker would drive a Buick, and a seven year-old model, that would have to be someone secure in his social position, immune from speculation, the owner of the local department store, Mr. Naussbaum, whose daughter had fine blond hair that fell in a cascade of ringlets past her shoulders, and a sad face, or so I would have said at twelve, meaning I loved her, that I knew her, the night she held my hand in the back seat of that Buick. I was being dropped off at home on her family’s way someplace else, and the detour they were making, my protests overruled by her brother, Paul, was another lesson in caste politics he was executing on me. He insisted his parents drive his pal to his front door. That one there, right here, I had to say, pointing with the same hand that forced from Clare’s still tingled and glowed, at the scabby white bungalow with the sway back, black-shingled roof, mounted without foundation on brick pilings.

Paul was my reason for being in that Buick. Not truly a friend, an agent of fate, a kid more sophisticated and savvy who preys on your credulity, pathos, envy, and admiration, draws you in and ends by teaching you enough of who you are to spoil boyhood forever. Why did he choose me? Our town was not gentle; another boy might have been impatient with subtlety and beaten his lights out. And who knows, considering how he died, vulgarly, typically for the town, drunk behind the wheel ramming a tree, what desires for anonymity and friendship moved him, and how the dream-besotted kid with his complementary complexion, black hair in place of his near tow, black eyes for his pale blue, all smolder of dreams and raw yet to passion may have seemed a chance for him to recover the lost ground if only my naivete withstood him. The experiment lasted only a few months during which he planted insults that would take years for me to unravel: introductions that left me flat-footed and tongue-tied, a dinner with two sets of silverware, a cook-Italian like me-rooms with expensive furniture I tiptoed through scared I might break something and contract my family to ransom and myself to my dad’s endless scorn for my daydreams. All these wonders Paul passed through with indifference. And his mother’s jade-colored eyes and courtly ease, his father’s altogether bolder, more forward face than any in our cowed family. It’s that face with his wife’s coloring that both his children inherited in muted versions. Claire-her blue-tinged pallor rimming her eyes with red like a lachrymose mime, took my hand and instead of convertibles and cruising the abbreviated strip of our town or parking and spooning on a rural lane, I longed for the stuffy enclosure of a Buick with its squinting rear window and her hand nesting in mine.

My dad arranged things with Veigelah, and on a morning in June when Viegelah came to the feed store to make a pick up, I was waiting on the loading dock, sitting on the burlap sack, another piece of cargo to truck away. I was in knee-high rubber boots and overalls, my dad having outfitted me for the guano storm where I was going. My feet were poaching in the rubber, the skip and bound of summer solstice anchored to a slogging shuffle, but my dad figured the conspicuous, and to me disgraced sheen of the new rubber would commit Viegelah to taking me. He had marched me into supply sales and handed me the denim overalls, tight folded as a surrendered flag, and then stuck the dung waders in my other hand. “The fruit never falls far from the tree.”

Viegelah drove up in a 1946 Ford pick-up with a spider-wed crack in the right hand windshield pane, rocking on the rutted road behind the store. I remember watching him out of the corner of my eye, feeling sullen and persecuted, and noting what a rum job he made of backing the truck to the dock. His effort was an antagonistic mix of daring and regret, or pre-occupation and sudden awakening. With much extraneous tacking, the truck finally was crookedly berthed, and Viegelah pops out the door, eager to abandon the napping machine..

He moved with springy energy, not altogether efficiently; he had a surplus of force to waste and he squandered it in exaggeration, or better, exuberance, relishing action, the congruent mechanics in it. He would always be exciting to be near because of the orbits his energy inscribed. He continually rescued himself from risky equations, tickling inertia, yanking the tail of gravity, tracing their outlines in everything, and more, making them reveal themselves and shed their curmudgeonly personalities and join him, finger-tip to finger-tip in a happy reel.

The truck was parked down the dock from me, and while Viegelah was clamoring into its bed from where he could high step to the dock, my dad came out from the warehouse. I saw his shadow cockling along the buckled boards, and even through the crinkly, peel of that shadow I could see the stoop of chronic disappointment in his shoulders. Right then, I wanted that job a lot more than facing my dad if I didn’t get it.

I tried wrestling the sack towards the distant truck, but it was too much for me, oozing out of my grip, and the boots gave only a mushy footing.

“Ah, Georgie, my dad sighed, but Viegelah took the sack by its two scruffs, wrinkling the spare burlap in his square hands, “So, Tim, maybe only eighty pounds this time”, and by its full length, a real feat of strength, bending at the knee but mostly at the lower back the way a real worker does it, flipped it up to a shoulder and hustled it to the truck, casting it onto the rusty bed.

“He tries Mr. Viegelah. Sometimes he tries.”

“He’ll do the brain work. I need someone to outsmart my birds.”

I never heard of a chicken farm run like Viegelah’s. His production was way above the norm, but the factory of plenty reminded me of a roadside attraction. His chickens matriculated to complete liberty through a chicken university that looked like a cross between a tree circus and a miniature golf course.

A family of Mexicans lived on the place and they had more relatives than the old lady in the shoe. They worked all over the county, but this was their home, and they fed Viegelah , who ate only when food was under his nose. Burritos, enchiladas, chile relanos, tacos, tamales, best to leave plates of food around that could be eaten by hand so he could grab some when he passed by. They knew his paths and the children baited the trap line just ahead of him, a game with them. They often waited nearby, hiding as children are allowed by covenant, saucer-eyed in plain sight but holding their breath, and if he missed the plate as he elaborately did, they could then canter ahead of him to the next place, revving themselves into panting pursuit, and all pulse and billows, try again. The third time was the charm; finally the old man with the corrugated forehead and wild hair and big nose would jump back in surprise, sniff suspiciously, study a burrito in his hand, peer around furtively, and pop it into his mouth, and they would laugh, a laugh they would soon lose and not recover until they found a lover, a chortling yelp of delight and mischief, and to any ear worth the tuning of the moment.

The Mexicans had a garden. Fertilized by guano its cup ran over, and they doubled the portions for me. I gained weight on the farm and for the first time I could remember, feeling ungrateful was uncoupled from feeling full.

Viegelah liked the lively commotion around their house, the flowerpots with begonias, gardenias and bougainvillea, and their infatuation with light and dark. They saw him looking at the Christmas lights they strung on to every twig and cornice and left them draped throughout the year. The wells of darkness drew him too, their black hair and black eyes, the wrought iron they favored, and their icons. “So, Georgie, look. They forget less.”

His own house had the ambience of an attic or repair shop. There was no room in his kitchen to fry an egg. A coke vending machine squatted by a table piled with tools and manuals. It was the trough kind that is no longer used: a well of water with a maze of metal tracks collaring the bottlenecks. You slid the bottle along the track, a coin freed a catch, and the bottle came out dripping cold. His bottles were all empty, pigeonholed in wooden crates. “Very sad to work without coke. I want you should buy some and make this machine work again. American food is inedible without it.”

I ordered ice and crates of coke. “Thank you, Georgie, the American touch. It should have stopped here.”

He graphed words and sentences. He used that same WilsonJones accounting book. The math made shapes from them. He mapped their cosmos. He must have sung the sentences, maybe they were precipitated from the tune, but the graphs were a calculus played on musical notes. The calculations generated figures, instead of analysis they seem expansive, at least to me reading them now. He favored certain shapes; do they arise from minor chords? I think so, because of the sadness in many of them. One chord that he played for me on the violin created a harmonic that rose independently of the notes that had combined to materialize it. He showed me its graph. It looked like an hourglass. The chord was from the name “Mileva”. He said “Marie” yielded nearly the same result.

That was why he hired me. The Mexicans for their metaphysic of light and dark, and their idolizing the material world, me for my Yankee-doodle optimism, or so I thought. But, I was there for my eyes and my still androgynous form, near that of his notes, the form as in cats most sexual and mythic, still humming with the original inspiration: Desire.

He had introduced geese into his operation. He had damned a stream to create a pond and set decoys in it until some geese and mallards skidded down. As I mentioned he was educating his chickens and these wild birds were the professors. The chickens took basic training in the yard, hopping up ladders, casting themselves off gangplanks, roosting in trees, but generation after generation when they were ready for the gate to be opened on the green world, waiting there would be these paragons. Viegelah stood alone in not believing chickens are stupid. He attributed their dim wits to panic and their panic to incarceration and a simplified arithmetic. They had been drafted into a market economy with only meager tools to cope. He intended to tap their native character that had seen them through seventy million more years of evolution than our own. And it did seem that the opened gate loosed a spirit in them, if that can be calculated by the bumper egg harvests lifted from meadow crèche-they see a good world to bring a chick into, Viegelah said- making an Easter egg hunt for us. By the serene and polite air of the birds, that spirit seemed to resume what had been interrupted by people, their millennial navigation from lizards to angels.

Before the first week was finished, I wanted to spend all my time on the farm. I complained to my dad that Viegelah was overworking me; he even wanted me on the weekends and to begin work at 6 a.m. I’d had enough. It worked. Knowing my time would not be my own, my dad was happy to volunteer me for seven day a week peonage. I pedaled to the farm squinting into the sunlight just spilling over the hills, the ruddy air laced with birdsong, and I rode back sadly with the sun folding up the blue canopy and crickets keening a prophesy of autumn into the smell of hay. Until Viegelah, insisted I stay some nights or he’d find someone else, and chickens not counting the days of the week I sure couldn’t afford not to stay, and the better part of the week, by far the better part of a week, would pass without me being given the chance to return home. My dad praised the education in the real world I was getting from a genius who thought about things the same as he did.

The day rolled into night. Christmas bulbs alight, guitar and mandolin and Viegelah on his violin pleating eddies in the air just yet royal purple with a crimson vent, a breeze soft-nosed nudging, the Mexican family all cheekbone, collie eye and raven hair. Viegelah circling the table, violin under his chin, and when it finally happened and quieted the mariachis to hear him off in the fields, the geese and mallards stirring and honking a tad at his passage, then returning to row into a gypsy dance, and lift from the feed store boy, a yodeling paean that made the young daughters clutch their collars; that night, flushed with girls’ blushes, the rooster tail Milky Way thrown across his shoulders, the night before he brought Claire to the farm.

“American box turtle”, Viegelah said. We were standing on a grassy path near the goose pond their crap stogies everywhere. Turtles were sunning on the rock. “Seven years ago, I built the dam. Mosquitoes, dragonflies, water bugs, they come first. Pussy willows, geese and ducks. And now this family. Maybe she came down stream? Three miles from here is Milagro Pond. That’s how she came. Three miles. She moves a tenth of a mile in two hours. Sixty hours. She holds her head about one and a half inches from the ground; I don’t know how good her senses to find a pond three miles away. Something else in the math, a constant I missed inside substance. She was pregnant. So, a crazy idea, the universe should be carried by a turtle? Why should anybody ever think such a thing? Time and gravity, what knows more than a turtle? The song of the turtle, Georgie, who hears it? Who’s the one you love, Georgie?

I let her name out where chickens curried the vegetable garden and roosters strutted in Aztec plumage, and geese and mallards skated the blue rafters, and ramshackle buildings shouldered begonias, and a windmill darned Christmas lights, and guitars and a violin decoyed songs from the ether, all strung together like an interior rhyme scheme, the non-sense, inevitable connections in a nursery rhyme, cows fully capable of jumping over the moon if dishes and spoons can elope together, or to say it another way, tied together by a constant inside antagonistic forms echoing three miles at a twentieth mile per hour, and rhyming Claire and George in a ballad played on spoon and washboard, or the marrow pipes of our bones.

Viegelah knew the Naussbaums. They were not Armenians. I had assumed they were because my dad tempered his bile for them from fear, and what he would say about them during the three-month tenure of my friendship with Paul struck the same note as for the Armenians in our town. They were part of a shadowy Asian cabal. He left their mutation at clannishness, or even gentled it to private. But, they were Jewish and great admirers of Viegelah who was at that time was the Jews’ big bogeyman; every family warped by expectations that the ark of genius should pass to them. With that as leverage, he brought Claire to the farm.

They would play duets, that’s what he told them. He owned an upright piano, actually it was a player piano, and the stippled music templates lay rolled up on the keyboard like celestial charts. She took piano lessons, but he brought her for me.

She had been dressed for the honor of accompanying the world famous physicist on the piano, dressed for a recital. Nearly a gown, a gown to me, nacreous silk blouse and long black skirt whose collection that day of rye berries and foxtails, I wonder how she explained. It was to be as close to a bride as she was ever to dress for me. I never married.

Viegelah told us to go for a walk while he tuned the piano, or maybe he just stepped aside. Reading his book I don’t need to ask how he knew, only to speculate on his grace. Not his glissade to the wings, but this machine he had set in motion before I ever arrived, his hurdy-gurdy cranked by the stars. Chickens and geese followed us, and when we sat in the wild rye they came around to have their feathers stroked, and the geese swayed their long necks in unison, two by two, and the roosters were content to be near us without strut or bluster, content I believe to look into our eyes, all of them were, that were opened to the heart of matter.

Viegelah’s Ledger

250 acres @ $20/acre=$5,000

Converted pension from Princeton: $3,800

Savings; $2,600

This farm is the navel of the sun. Durac will perhaps give $100 for the Nobel Medal. I shall make him the offer, threaten to sell it to the gossipy scullery maid, Teller. The sailboat in Quechog. I will miss it. In September the sound may turn the turquoise of a tropical butterfly. If I could, I would hook it to the sun and let us be pulled west. As it is, I shall give it to Robin. Loss:$60, but he is fifteen and will sail it to the sun. It deserves it for feeding in those pastures, and the boy, too. He has never been to Europe and is freckle-faced on the sea.

Europe is dead and all her children. The President from Ohio congratulated me on August 6 with a letter. No body in Europe ever dressed as badly as this man who once sold clothes. The farmlands knew little of Europe; I will wear a Russian smock and a Dutch boy’s pants and clogs, and the questions will stop there. The cow I shall buy with the money from selling my silver and china, I will give a tin bell that will clang the Vedas in Sanskrit and I will never speak to Mileva in German. I will only address her with the violin, which is hers, always.

Windmill-cost: $80, but offensive shape. These propeller shaped windmills on top of wooden derricks butcher the winds. Invested time in designing a wind engine, but after two months have decided on a four-vane windmill of French design. I am confident of the wind’s willing hand on such capstans, and the larger scale winch shall assist them in hauling in the new seasons. Expense: $120 and six week’s labor that I discount as time underneath the sky’s hoopa.

East to West, let the sun pull creation across this farm without fences. Pull the winds behind you and bring the geese to this pond where they are welcome. Feel comfortable here barefoot and see your own feathers woven through theirs. North, let the polar star turn above this farm and sow souls here where they are welcome. This farm asks to lie between the four directions that all journeys may pass through here and rest for as long as they choose. I call you Mileva.

The farm is happy today. Lovers are united. Mileva, he has eyes like yours and so I hope you can see again. Mileva, as we knew then, the substance that composed us was no different than other matter. Remember, how after making love it was quiet enough to hear things speaking, and we heard them singing. And then I walked away and never heard them again. I abandoned you to take credit for what love gave us. I said I have tried to understand the mind of god. The century’s catastrophes followed this beheading. I have tried to open a door to invite back what we knew then and forever: god’s desire.