Beside the door, suspended from a curlicue bracket of wrought iron, hung a bell with a leather cord dangling from its clapper. I gave the cord a tentative tug, and the clapper swung gently, barely tapping the bell. I gave a stronger pull, and the clapper struck with a pure, high ring, the sort of ethereal chime you might hear wafting down from some Tibetan monastery high in the Himalayas. I waited a moment, listening for footsteps, but heard none. She’s eighty-five years old, I reminded myself, give her a minute. Still no one came, so I rapped more loudly on one of the sidelights. Still no footsteps. Feeling slightly furtive, I tried the handle on the glass storm door. It was unlocked, as was the red wooden door. I eased it open just far enough to lean my head inside and called out, “Hello? Mrs. Novak?”
“Yes?” The voice had a slight quaver to it.
“It’s Dr. Brockton. We spoke on the phone.”
“I know we did. I might be ancient, but I’m not senile.”
I smiled. Yes, she was sharp all right. “Should I come in?”
“Unless you’d rather stay outside and shout,” she said, sounding simultaneously amused and exasperated, crusty and playful. “Follow my voice.” I stepped inside and found myself in a low-ceilinged foyer, its walls paneled with the same warm redwood as the home’s exterior. The floor was terrazzo, a glassy-smooth mosaic of marble chips set into concrete and polished to a soft lustre of green, red, black, and ivory. “I was beginning to think maybe you’d stood me up.”
Her voice, together with a broad track of reflected daylight, led me to a wide doorway. When I stepped through it, the space opened up dramatically, and I blinked from both the brightness and the unexpectedness of it. “Oh my,” I heard myself saying, “this is wonderful.”
“Yes,” she said. “I designed it to be wonderful. Back when wonderful was still a possibility.”
It took me a moment to find her, just as it had taken some effort to find her house. She was sitting in a high, wing-backed chair that nearly enveloped her; the chair was off to one side of a large living room, facing a wall of glass that looked out into the woods behind the house. The polished floor extended seamlessly beyond the glass and onto a large terrace; the terrace was partly sheltered beneath a high, wide roof overhang; the overhang was made of the same tongue-and-groove redwood as the walls and eaves of the house. Together, the architectural elements and their blurred transitions — the seamless floor, the wall of glass, and the unbroken planes of redwood — conspired to hide the boundary between indoors and out, and if not for the warmth in the sun-drenched room, I’d have been hard pressed to say whether the space was enclosed or not.
“Looks like wonderful is still possible,” I said, walking to the side of her chair, “at least in here. It’s Dr. Brockton, Mrs. Novak. Thank you for letting me come see you.”
“Letting you? I practically twisted your arm out of the socket. Do you have any idea how seldom I have company? Almost everyone I used to know is dead or dying. It’s depressing as hell. By the way, I haven’t been Mrs. Novak in sixty years. Novak was three husbands ago. It’s Montgomery now, and Mr. Montgomery kicked the bucket quite a while back. So call me Beatrice, unless you want to remind me I’m old and make me cranky.”
“I’d hate to make you cranky, Beatrice,” I said.
“It wouldn’t be in your best interest,” she agreed. “Sit down, and tell me what it is you want to know. The tea should still be hot — I made it about five minutes ago.” A large mug sat on a table between the two chairs, and wisps of steam wafting up from it caught the slanting afternoon light. Beside the mug was a small china plate that held two round, golden cookies. “The cookies are Scottish shortbread,” she said. “Butter and flour and sugar. If you don’t want them, throw them out for the birds, because I’m not supposed to have them.”
I headed to the rocker but stopped before sitting down. “You’re not having any tea? Can I get you anything else — some water, maybe?”
“Water? Never touch the damn stuff,” she said. “I’ll have some vodka when it’s cocktail hour.”
“When’s that?”
“Five,” she said. “What time is it now?”
I glanced at my watch; I was about to tell her it was three forty-five when the note of teasing and hopefulness in her voice registered with me. “This watch is not worth a damn,” I fibbed. “It eats a battery once a week.”
She laughed. “Dear me, you are a smooth one,” she said. “Too bad I’m not forty years younger. I’d make you fall desperately in love with me. You’re an interesting fellow, Dr. Brockton.”
“Call me Bill,” I said, “unless you want to make me cranky.”
She smiled, then tilted her face toward the window and closed her eyes; the low sun highlighted the wrinkles left by decades of laughter and pain, but underneath I could discern the planes of a younger woman’s face. “That sun looks like a five-o’clock sun to me,” she said. “Close enough, anyway. The vodka’s on the bookshelf behind you. Pour me two fingers’ worth, would you, Bill? There’s ice in the ice bucket. Join me if you like.”
“I’d better not,” I said. “I can tell I need to keep my wits about me when I’m with you.” I didn’t see any point in telling her that I didn’t drink alcohol; she might think I disapproved of drinking, and that wasn’t the case. Rather, having spent years battling Menier’s disease, I tended to steer clear of anything that had the remotest chance of making me dizzy.
A crystal decanter, silver ice bucket, tongs, and two tumblers sat on a silver tray on a waist-high counter running the length of the back wall. Below the counter were cabinets; above it were bookshelves containing hundreds of volumes, ranging from small paperbacks to large leatherbound volumes. I wondered if she’d read them all. I put a few ice cubes into a tumbler, then poured the vodka from the decanter, catching a whiff of orange in the liquor. Did “two fingers” mean with or without the ice, I wondered, but I hated to betray my ignorance by asking. Without, I decided, and kept pouring, since the ice alone filled at least one finger’s worth of space.
One end of the counter held a cluster of framed photographs, and as I delivered the vodka, I detoured past the pictures. A half dozen or so in number, they were all in black-and-white, and I guessed by the clothing and hairstyles that they were from the 1940s. Suddenly I recognized one of the photos: I had seen it in the museum and the library the day of Novak’s funeral. It showed a striking young woman perched at a console of dials and levers, and in the five seconds it took me to walk back to the chairs with Beatrice’s drink, I realized that the pretty girl in the photo had the same cheekbones and jawline as the old woman facing the fading light. “That’s you in the picture,” I said.
“Not anymore,” she said. “That was a lifetime ago. But back during the war, I was the calutron poster girl.”
“What’s a calutron?”
“A California University cyclotron,” she said. “Invented by Ernest Lawrence, the Nobel laureate physicist from Berkeley. We used them at Y-12 to separate uranium-235 for the bomb. We weren’t told that’s what we were doing, of course. The foreman just told us to watch the gauges and twist the dials to keep the needles centered. So I watched and I twisted. And atom by atom, I was separating the isotopic wheat from the chaff, you might say. I was a winnower, Bill, on the threshing floor of the atomic barn.”
I held out the tumbler to her, and I noticed a slight tremor in the hand that took it. The sunlight caught the ice cubes and made them glow, like golden, living things. Beatrice’s skin was translucent in the sunlight; through it, I could see the spiderwork of thin purple veins, and — underneath — the withering strings of muscle and tendon. I almost thought I could see bone, too, but perhaps I was imagining it. She drew a deep breath, blew it out, and then took a sip of vodka. “I was a beauty once,” she said, pointing with her glass toward the photograph. She didn’t say it boastfully; it was a statement of fact, with a layer of nostalgia underneath. “As I said, that was a lifetime ago. I’m not that girl anymore. But oh, the stories I could tell you about her.”