ENG 102: Final Reading Selection and Writing Instructions

Spring Semester 2006

Astronomer's Wife
Kay Boyle

There is an evil moment on awakening when all things seem to pause.  But for women, they only falter and may be set in action by a single move:  a lifted hand and the pendulum will swing, or the voice raised and through every room the pulse takes up its beating.  The astronomer's wife felt the interval gaping and at once filled it to the brim.  She fetched up her gentle voice and sent it warily down the stairs for coffee, swung her feet out upon the oval mat, and hailed the morning with her bare arms' quivering flesh drawn taut in rhythmic exercise:  left, left, left my wife and fourteen children, right, right, right in the middle of the dusty road.

The day would proceed from this, beat by beat, without reflection, like every other day.  The astronomer was still asleep, or feigning it, and she, once out of bed, had come into her own possession.  Although scarcely ever out of sight of the impenetrable silence of his brow, she would be absent from him all the day in being clean, busy, kind.  He was a man of other things, a dreamer.  At times he lay still for hours, at others he sat upon the roof behind his telescope, or wandered down the pathway to the road and out across the mountains.  This day, like any other, would go on from the removal of the spot left there from dinner on the astronomer's vest to the severe thrashing of the mayonnaise for lunch.  That man might be each time the new arching wave, and woman the undertow that sucked him back, were things she had been told by his silence were so.

In spite of the earliness of the hour, the girl had heard her mistress's voice and was coming up the stairs.  At the threshold of the bedroom she paused, and said:  "Madame, the plumber is here."

The astronomer's wife put on her white and scarlet smock very quickly and buttoned it at the neck.  Then she stepped carefully around the motionless spread of water in the hall. 

"Tell him to come right up," she said.  She laid her hands on the bannisters and stood looking down the wooden stairway.  "Ah, I am Mrs. Ames," she said softly as she saw him mounting.  "I am Mrs. Ames," she said softly, softly down the flight of stairs.  "I am Mrs. Ames," spoken soft as a willow weeping.  "The professor is still sleeping.  Just step this way."

The plumber himself looked up and saw Mrs. Ames with her voice hushed, speaking to him.  She was a youngish woman, but this she had forgotten.  The mystery and silence of her husband's mind lay like a chiding finger on her lips.  Her eyes were gray, for the light had been extinguished in them.  The strange dim halo of her yellow hair was still uncombed and sideways on her head.

For all of his heavy boots, the plumber quieted the sound of his feet, and together they went down the hall, picking their way around the still lake of water that spread as far as the landing and lay docile there.  The plumber was a tough, hardy man; but he took off his hat when he spoke to her and looked her fully, almost insolently in the eye.

"Does it come from the wash-basin," he said, "or from the other . . .?"

"Oh, from the other," said Mrs. Ames without hesitation.

In this place the villas were scattered out few and primitive, and although beauty lay without there was no reflection of her face within.  Here all was awkward and unfit; a sense of wrestling with uncouth forces gave everything an austere countenance.  Even the plumber, dealing as does a woman with matters under hand, was grave and stately.  The mountains round about seemed to have cast them into the shadow of great dignity.

Mrs. Ames began speaking of their arrival that summer in the little villa, mourning each event as it followed on the other.

"Then, just before going to bed last night," she said, "I noticed something was unusual."

The plumber cast down a folded square of sack-cloth on the brimming floor and laid his leather apron on it.  Then he stepped boldly onto the heart of the island it shaped and looked long into the overflowing bowl.

"The water should be stopped from the meter in the garden," he said at last.

"Oh, I did that," said Mrs. Ames, "the very first thing last night.  I turned it off at once, in my nightgown, as soon as I saw what was happening.  But all this had already run in."

The plumber looked for a moment at her red kid slippers.  She was standing just at the edge of the clear, pure-seeming tide.

"It's no doubt the soil lines," he said severely.  "It may be that something has stopped them, but my opinion is that the water seals aren't working.  That's the trouble often enough in such cases.  If you had a valve you wouldn't be caught like this."

Mrs. Ames did not know how to meet this rebuke.  She stood, swaying a little, looking into the plumber's blue relentless eye.

"I'm sorry--I'm sorry that my husband," she said, "is still--resting and cannot go into this with you.  I'm sure it must be very interesting. . . ."

"You'll probably have to have the traps sealed," said the plumber grimly, and at the sound of this Mrs. Ames' hand flew in dismay to the side of her face.  The plumber made no move, but the set of his mouth as he looked at her seemed to soften.  "Anyway, I'll have a look from the garden end," he said.

"Oh, do," said the astronomer's wife in relief.  Here was a man who spoke of action and object as simply as women did!  But however hushed her voice had been, it carried clearly to Professor Ames who lay, dreaming and solitary, upon his bed.  He heard their footsteps come down the hall, pause, and skip across the pool of overflow.

"Katherine!" said the astronomer in a ringing tone.  "There's a problem worthy of your mettle!"

Mrs. Ames did not turn her head, but led the plumber swiftly down the stairs.  When the sun in the garden struck her face, he saw there was a wave of color in it, but this may have been anything but shame.

"You see how it is," said the plumber, as if leading her mind away.  "The drains run from these houses right down the hill, big enough for a man to stand upright in them, and clean as a whistle, too."  There they stood in the garden with the vegetation flowering in disorder all about.  The plumber looked at the astronomer's wife.  "They come out at the torrent on the other side of the forest beyond there," he said.

But the words the astronomer had spoken still sounded in her in despair.  The mind of man, she knew, made steep and sprightly flights, pursued illusion, took foothold in the nameless things that cannot pass between the thumb and finger.  But whenever the astronomer gave voice to the thoughts that soared within him, she returned in gratitude to the long expanses of his silence.  Desert-like they stretched behind and before the articulation of his scorn.

Life, life is an open sea, she sought to explain it in sorrow, and to survive women cling to the floating debris on the tide.  But the plumber had suddenly fallen upon his knees in the grass and had crooked his fingers through the ring of the drains' trap-door.  When she looked down she saw that he was looking up into her face, and she saw too that his hair was as light as gold.

"Perhaps Mr. Ames," he said rather bitterly, "would like to come down with me and have a look around?"

"Down?" said Mrs. Ames in wonder.

"Into the drains," said the plumber brutally.  "They're a study for a man who likes to know what's what."

"Oh, Mr. Ames," said Mrs. Ames in confusion.  "He's still--still in bed, you see."

The plumber lifted his strong, weathered face and looked curiously at her.  Surely it seemed to him strange for a man to linger in bed, with the sun pouring yellow as wine all over the place.  The astronomer's wife saw his lean cheeks, his high, rugged bones, and the deep seams in his brow.  His flesh was as firm and clean as wood, stained richly tan with the climate's rigor.  His fingers were blunt, but comprehensible to her, gripped in the ring and holding the iron door wide.  The backs of his hands were bound round and round with ripe blue veins of blood.

"At any rate," said the astronomer's wife, and the thought of it moved her lips to smile a little, "Mr. Ames would never go down there alive.  He likes going up," she said.  And she, in her turn, pointed, but impudently, towards the heavens.  "On the roof.  Or on the mountains.  He's been up on the top of them many times."

"It's a matter of habit," said the plumber, and suddenly he went down the trap.  Mrs. Ames saw a bright little piece of his hair still shining, like a star, long after the rest of him had gone.  Out of the depths, his voice, hollow and dark with foreboding, returned to her.  "I think something has stopped the elbow," was what he said.

This was speech that touched her flesh and bone and made her wonder.  When her husband spoke of height, having no sense of it, she could not picture it nor hear.  Depth or magic passed her by unless a name were given.  But madness in a daily shape, as elbow stopped, she saw clearly and well.  She sat down on the grasses, bewildered that it should be a man who had spoken to her so.

She saw the weeds springing up, and she did not move to tear them up from life.  She sat powerless, her sense veiled, with no action taking shape beneath her hands.  In this way some men sat for hours on end, she knew, tracking a single thought back to its origin. The mind of man could balance and divide, weed out, destroy.  She sat on the full, burdened grasses, seeking to think, and dimly waiting for the plumber to return.

Whereas her husband had always gone up, as the dead go, she knew now that there were others who went down, like the corporeal being of the dead.  That men were then divided into two bodies now seemed clear to Mrs. Ames.  This knowledge stunned her with its simplicity and took the uneasy motion from her limbs.  She could not stir, but sat facing the mountains' rocky flanks, and harking in silence to lucidity.  Her husband was the mind, this other man the meat, of all mankind.

After a little, the plumber emerged from the earth:  first the light top of his head, then the burnt brow, and then the blue eyes fringed with whitest lash.  He braced his thick hands flat on the pavings of the garden-path and swung himself completely from the pit.

"It's the soil lines," he said pleasantly.  "The gases," he said as he looked down upon her lifted face, "are backing up the drains."

"What in the world are we going to do?" said the astronomer's wife softly. There was a young and strange delight in putting questions to which true answers would be given.  Everything the astronomer had ever said to her was a continuous query to which there could be no response.

"Ah, come, now," said the plumber, looking down and smiling.  "There's a remedy for every ill, you know.  Sometimes it may be that," he said as if speaking to a child, "or sometimes the other thing.  But there's always a help for everything amiss."

Things come out of herbs and make you young again, he might have been saying to her; or the first good rain will quench any drought; or time of itself will put a broken bone together.

"I'm going to follow the ground pipe out right to the torrent," the plumber was saying.  "The trouble's between here and there and I'll find it on the way.  There's nothing at all that can't be done over for the caring," he was saying, and his eyes were fastened on her face in insolence, or gentleness, or love.

The astronomer's wife stood up, fixed a pin in her hair, and turned around towards the kitchen.  Even while she was calling the servant's name, the plumber began speaking again.

"I once had a cow that lost her cud," the plumber was saying.  The girl came out on the kitchen-step and Mrs. Ames stood smiling at her in the sun.

"The trouble is very serious, very serious," she said across the garden.  "When Mr. Ames gets up, please tell him I've gone down."

She pointed briefly to the open door in the pathway, and the plumber hoisted his kit on his arm and put out his hand to help her down.

"But I made her another in no time," he was saying, "out of flowers and things and what-not."

"Oh," said the astronomer's wife in wonder as she stepped into the heart of the earth.  She took his arm, knowing that what he said was true.

Instructions for writing:

You will have 50 minutes to write your essay. You may use a dictionary.

If your class is meeting in Bowman 310, you may word-process your essay. Please format it with double spacing before printing it and handing it in to your instructor.

You may write your essay by hand, if you prefer; if you do so, please bring lined notebook paper for writing your essay, and write on every other line.

There is no length requirement for this essay, but please remember that it is an essay rather than a single paragraph. Be sure to use quotation marks when quoting words from the story and to cite the author's last name in parentheses; however, no Works Cited page will be required for this essay.

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Posted by Anita L. Cook, Acting Writing Center Director

Spring 2006