novelxo Half Moon Bay: Chapter 12
Situated in a quiet pocket of campus, behind a glade edged with oaks and Japanese maples, the Faculty Club comprises several structures knitted together by dim hallways. I hadn’t been inside since my playing days, when the athletics department would book it for grip-and-grins with team boosters.
Climbing the steps, I heard the rush of nearby Strawberry Creek, dry most months, hectic as winter barreled toward spring. Muted sun yielded to gloom as I stepped inside.
Carved pillars, stained glass, antlers over the fireplace—the chummy, thready elegance that belies professional jealousy. At eleven twenty-five a.m., the bar was doing brisk business, white hair predominating.
The hostess responded to the name Delia Moskowitz with a vacant smile. There was no such member, she assured me. Perhaps I wanted the Women’s Faculty Club?
She showed me out through a rear exit, directing me up the road toward a more demure brown-shingle building landscaped with hydrangeas and dogwoods.
The lobby of the women’s club was a sprucer, softer, more compact version of its male counterpart—whitewashed plaster in place of knotty paneling, cream upholstery rather than tobacco leather. From the library came the sound of a lecture; I glimpsed chairs arrayed in a circle and a young woman gesturing toward a PowerPoint headed CLEAN WATER: THE COMING GLOBAL CRISIS.
Obeying a sort of cosmic equity, a male host stood behind the desk. Delia Moskowitz’s name made him nod readily.
He led me to a corner of the dining room overlooking the patio. At a table laid with white cloth and china sat a plump woman dressed head to toe in lavender: tweed skirt, silk jacket, lavender crocodile-skin pumps. She looked younger than her eighty-two years, streaks of undyed brown at her hairline, a quick, mischievous pucker gracing full lips.
“Let me guess,” Delia Moskowitz said. “You went to the other one.”
I laughed.
She clapped her hands. “Happens every time.”
“I must’ve walked past this place a thousand times.” I pulled out a chair. “I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I never knew what it was.”
“That’s the point. Drink?”
“No, thanks. I have to drive home.”
“As do I.” She waggled her wineglass. “I find this makes it much more fun.”
We ordered sandwiches and soup.
“Thanks for agreeing to meet,” I said.
“You’re welcome. I don’t mind telling you that your letter gave me a kick in the pants. Bev Franchette…Now, there’s a name I haven’t thought about in ages.”
“How well did you know her?”
“Reasonably well, I’d say. For a brief period we were quite close.”
Delia Moskowitz had enrolled in 1962 to begin a PhD in physics. The following year, Beverly arrived from Columbia University—not as a grad student, but as a postdoc.
“You’re sure about the date? Nineteen sixty-three?”
“Unless I’m misremembering,” Delia said, smiling in a way that indicated she was constitutionally incapable of misremembering.
“She graduated from college in 1960.”
“If you say so.”
“That means she would’ve had to complete her PhD in three years. Less.”
“I confess it’s been a while since I’ve done such advanced math. But I suppose so.”
“It can’t be typical to finish that fast.”
“Not for most people,” Delia Moskowitz said. “For Bev it sounds about right.”
“She must have been brilliant.”
“Oh yes. I detested her.”
“I thought you were friends.”
“I said we were close.”
“Is there a difference?”
“Have you ever seen planet earth?” she asked.
“Beg pardon?”
“It’s a TV series. Planet Earth.”
“Oh. Yes, I have.”
“There’s one part—I believe it’s the very first episode—about emperor penguins.”
“Remind me.”
“Emperor penguins,” she repeated, savoring the concept. “After they mate, they spend several months in the middle of an ice plain in Antarctica, incubating their eggs, huddled together for warmth. Each penguin depends on the insulation his neighbors provide in order to make it through the winter. If they don’t stick close together, they’ll die. But the outermost ring of penguins has nothing at their backs to protect them from the elements. So they start shoving their way to the center of the circle. No sooner have they made it there, however, than the next incoming wave of penguins pushes in, followed by the next wave, and the next, so that eventually that first penguin gets forced back to the outside, and has to start shoving in all over again.”
She took a long swig of wine, leaving lavender lipstick on the rim.
“Do you see how it works?” she said. “What appears as a noble sacrifice made for the betterment of the group, is nothing of the sort. Quite the opposite: It’s the continual struggle between individuals that keeps them alive, by forcibly spreading the suffering around.”
I said, “That was your relationship to Beverly.”
“It’s not a perfect analogy. The penguins are males. The females have gone off to find food. Of course. With Bev and me, it was just the two of us, not a large, engulfing mass. The fact of the matter is that we were both exposed at all times. In essence, though, yes. We were partners in hardship.”
I thought of Beverly Franchette’s yearbook.
Sole female member of the Math Club.
The don’t-mess-with-me expression.
Our food arrived. Delia Moskowitz picked up her turkey club and went at it with gusto, pausing occasionally to dab at the corners of her mouth with her napkin.
I said, “You ended up leaving the program.”
“She left first,” she said, chewing. “I hung on for a while before it got to be too much to handle on my own. What was I supposed to do? If you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor, I was a gazelle among lions.”
She put the sandwich down and reached for more wine. “I suppose you could accuse me of weakness, not wanting to endure who-knew-how-many more years of professors sticking their grubby, chalk-covered hands up my skirt.”
“When you say Bev left, where did she go?”
“That was another thing. Not only did she abandon me, she took the easy way out and married the teacher.”
“Gene.”
“Don’t look so disappointed. Way of the world.”
Chloe Bellara and Kai MacLeod. Definitely fucking.
I said, “When did their relationship start?”
“Well now, my dear, I wasn’t in the room to witness it.”
“Approximately.”
“Approximately? As soon as she got off the bus. He was her adviser.”
“Business as usual.”
“Quite. Though their particular business did cause a bit of a brouhaha.”
“Why?”
“The surprise factor. Some of the men were notorious lechers, you learned to steer clear. Gene wasn’t one of them. He had a reputation as a family man, which made it ever so much juicier. Academics are awful gossips, you know. What we lack in dollars we make up for in schadenfreude.”
I recalled the date on Gene and Bev’s marriage certificate: 1964. The groom had one previous marriage, ended by dissolution. “Must’ve been a whirlwind romance.”
Delia Moskowitz said, “Bear in mind, those days you couldn’t get divorced by filling out a form. You had to show cause. Either that or you spent a few weeks living in Reno. That’s what Gene did, if memory serves. Off to Nevada. Quel scandale.”
One reason, perhaps, that Peter Franchette had been unable to find a record of the divorce.
“Naturally, Beverly bore the brunt of the shame,” Delia said.
“Forced out of the program?”
“That depends what you mean by ‘forced.’ Doubtless she was made to feel excruciatingly unwelcome. Whether she was gifted or not was immaterial. She was now a homewrecker. Everyone who was friends with Gene and Helen had to pick a side.”
“Helen was his first wife.”
Delia Moskowitz nodded.
“Any chance you remember her maiden name?”
“She was always Helen Franchette to me.”
“You called him a family man. I take it they had children.”
“A girl and a boy. You’ll want their names…Let me think, it’ll come back to me. One thing I can tell you is that the young man took it quite hard. He was a teenager when the whole sordid business came out. The stigma of a broken home? Then Helen goes and sticks her head in the oven—”
“Wait wait wait,” I said. “She committed suicide?”
“She tried. It didn’t work. People—it sounds hideous to joke, but—they said, ‘Helen, poor creature, she can’t even get that right.’ Looking back I wonder if she intended to go through with it, or if it was a ploy to bait Gene into staying. Regardless, she failed.”
“The poor kids.”
“Their unhappiness must’ve been chronic. Before the scandal—having parents like that.”
“Like what?”
She paused. “Gene could be…severe. He brooked no fools. If he didn’t care for what you were saying, or if it was something he already knew, he’d turn on his heel and walk away, right in the middle of your sentence. And Helen. Not very bright. Obviously, she had a dramatic streak. She liked to drink.”
“You knew her.”
“Insofar as whenever there was a social gathering for the lab, I ended up talking with the wives, rather than my alleged colleagues.”
I repeated Peter’s description of Beverly and the Albuquerque Stepford wives.
“That’s it exactly,” Delia Moskowitz said. “Here I am, up to my elbows in quantum theory, and they’re asking me, do I have a good recipe for meatloaf.”
“He also called her emotional to a fault.”
“I suppose relative to Gene, she was.”
“Did she drink?”
“Not noticeably more or less than the rest of us. Everyone smoked and drank. On that note.” She waved her wineglass at the waiter: Another.
I was about to ask about Gene and Bev having children of their own when Delia rapped the table. “Norman. That was the son’s name. Norman Franchette. Troubled boy.”
“Define ‘troubled.’ ”
“He beat Gene up.”
“That’s pretty troubled. How bad?”
“I don’t think he was seriously hurt. More like shaken up. And talk about scandale: It happened at the lab.”
“It’s funny,” I said. “I haven’t been able to find a record of Gene working at Berkeley.”
“Well, they’ve probably written him out of the lab history. There’s a sort of rivalry between us and Los Alamos. Not a feud, but they’re always competing for funding and talent. It had to be a coup for Los Alamos when he transferred.”
“Which was his site? Here or Livermore?”
“At that time they were one and the same. They didn’t formally split Livermore off till later. Gene worked at both. He kept an office up the hill, a few doors down from where a few of the other grad students and I shared space. We’d be schvitzing over the page, chipping away at the next great discovery, five of us crammed into a room ten by twelve. We had to leave the door and windows open or else we’d suffocate…” She shook her head at the memory. “Anyhow, I heard this ghastly commotion out in the hall. I stick my head out, and there’s the boy, kicking and thrashing while guards drag him out. Gene’s following along behind, holding his broken glasses. ‘No, no, let him go, it’s a family matter.’ One of the more thrilling days I had in my brief career as a research scientist. I’ll add that I was gratified not to feel like the most ogled person in the building for once.”
“After Bev left academia, what did she do?”
Delia Moskowitz shrugged. “Became Mrs. Gene Franchette.”
“Did they have children?”
“I thought it was their son that put you up to this.”
“Other than him, I mean. An older child.”
“I assume I would’ve heard about it if it happened while I was still around the department. Nobody invited me to any baby shower.”
I showed her the snapshot of Beverly and the child; the date on the back.
Delia smiled. “Madonna and child. Good for her. No, we’d fallen out of touch by then. ’Sixty-nine, I was no longer in Berkeley. Although it reminds me of the last time I did see her. This must’ve been late ’65 or early ’66, because I’d made up my mind to drop out. I was adrift, at a loss for what to do next. I went to the library and began wandering the stacks, picking up books at random. I thought I might find one that called out to me. Wouldn’t you know, there’s Bev, alone in a carrel.”
“Doing what.”
“Nothing. Just sitting there. I meant to leave her in peace, but she spotted me and waved me over. My goodness, but was she happy to see me. As I told you, our friendship was built on common interest. Enemy of my enemy, et cetera. It had been a long time since we’d had reason to speak. But she looked at me like I was salvation itself. She started asking about my work. She was hungry for information. When I told her I was quitting, she got very upset. ‘You can’t do that. You’ll regret it.’ ”
“She wanted to save you from making the same mistake she had.”
“Perhaps. I wasn’t about to take advice from her. She’d made her choices and had to live with them.”
No harshness, just the perspective of someone who’d made her own hard decisions.
If Peter Franchette was right, and the child in the snapshot was his sister, Gene and Beverly had been married for four or five years before having her. I said so to Delia, wondering out loud if they’d had difficulty conceiving.
She said, “Who knows? Or they didn’t want a child to begin with. Accidents happen.”
“Or people change their minds.”
She smiled. “A universe of possibility.”
“I’m guessing you didn’t hear about the fire, either.”
“What fire?”
I told her.
“Goodness,” she said. “Norman was madder than I realized.”
“He’s who comes to mind?”
“Oh, now, I was speaking facetiously. I didn’t know the kid from Adam, except for what I witnessed at the lab, and what I heard through the grapevine. Problem child.”
The waiter brought her a fresh Chardonnay. Delia sipped at it, gazing out a window on the opposite side of the dining room. “Those were brutal days, downright barbaric. Your generation is clueless. You think things are nasty today…We didn’t have the luxury of insulting each other from behind a keyboard. If you wanted to effect change, you had to get up, go out into the streets, and crack heads. This nonsense? It’s child’s play.”
I realized she was staring in the direction of People’s Park.
“Don’t I sound like a relic,” she said.
“You sound nostalgic.”
“Well, perhaps I am.”
“You could always get out there now,” I said. “Crack some heads. I won’t tell.”
A wicked gleam. “Pardon my skepticism, pig.”
—
I KNOCKED AT my father-in-law’s office door and entered. Paul had the baby propped on his lap and was making googly faces at her.
“Hey there,” I said. “Everything go okay?”
“It went perfect. You,” he said to Charlotte, “are perfect.”
She gurgled happily.
“You see that?” Paul said. “She knows when she’s being complimented. Don’t you?”
“Gah.”
“Yes. Grandpa.”
“Gah.”
“Are you hearing this? She’s saying ‘Grandpa.’ ”
“I’m hearing it.”
“Don’t mind him, Charlotte. Grandpa understands you. How’d your lunch go?”
“I hope my memory’s half as good as hers when I’m her age. What about you guys? What’d you do?”
“Oh, a bit of everything. We played. We talked. I explained why correlation doesn’t equal causation. She got it faster than most adults. Most adults don’t ever understand, do they, Charlotte? It’ll be your job to help spread awareness. The burden of perfection.”
“You know, you’re not supposed to tell them that.”
“Tell them what.”
“That they’re perfect,” I said.
“Says who.”
“All the parenting manuals.”
“What, pray tell, is the problem?”
“It establishes unrealistic expectations.”
“It would for children who aren’t actually perfect. Fortunately for you,” he said, lifting her up and nuzzling her stomach, “you are.”
I glanced at the car seat insert. “Did she sleep?”
“Not a wink. Who can sleep, with so much ground to cover? I wasn’t about to waste our precious time together sleeping.” He held her out to me. “Let that be Daddy’s problem.”