Of course, my husband’s name isn’t really Lancelot Stebbins, because I am changing names and circumstances, as far as I can, to protect the guilty. However, the point is that even if I used real names you would not recognize my husband.
Lancelot had a talent in that respect-a talent for being passed over, for going unnoticed. His discoveries are invariably anticipated, or blurred by the presence of a greater discovery made simultaneously. At scientific conventions his papers are poorly attended because another paper of greater importance is being given in another section.
Naturally this has had its effect on him. It changed him.
When I first married him, twenty-five years ago, he was a sparkling catch. He was well-to-do through inheritance and already a trained physicist with an intense ambition and great promise. As for myself, I believe myself to have been pretty then, but that didn’t last. What did last was my introversion and my failure to be the kind of social success an ambitious young faculty member needs for a wife.
Perhaps that was part of Lancelot’s talent for going unnoticed. Had he married another kind of wife, she might have made him visible in her radiation.
Did he realize that himself after a while? Was that why he grew away from me after the first two or three reasonably happy years? Sometimes I believed this and bitterly blamed myself.
But then I would think it was only his thirst for fame, which grew for being unslaked. He left his position on the faculty and built a laboratory of his own far outside town, for the sake, he said, of cheap land and of isolation.
Money was no problem. In his field, the government was generous with its grants and those he could always get. On top of that, he used our own money without limit.
I tried to withstand him. I said, ‘But it’s not necessary, Lancelot. It’s not as though we have financial worries. It’s not as though they’re not willing to let you remain on the university staff. All I want are children and a normal life.’
But there was a burning inside him that blinded him to everything else. He turned angrily on me. ‘There is something that must come first. The world of science must recognize me for what I am, for a – a – great investigator.’
At that time, he still hesitated to apply the term gemus to himself.
It didn’t help. The fall of chance remained always and perpetually against him. His laboratory hummed with work; he hired assistants at excellent salaries; he drove himself roughly and pitilessly. Nothing came of it.
I kept hoping he would give up someday; return to the_city; allow us o lead a normal, quiet life. I waited, but always when he might have admitted defeat, some new battle would be taken up, some new attempt to storm the bastions of fame. Each time he charged with such hope and fell back in such despair.
And always he turned on me; for if he was ground down by the world, he could always grind me in return. I am not a brave person, but I was coming to believe I must leave him.
And yet . . .
In this last year he had obviously been girding himself for another battle. A last one, I thought. There was something about him more intense, more a-quiver than I had ever seen before. There was the way he murmured to himself and laughed briefly at nothing. There were the times he went for days without food and nights without sleep. He even took to keeping laboratory notebooks in a bedroom safe as though he feared.even his own assistants.
Of course I was fatalistically certain that this attempt of his would fail also. But surely, if it failed, then at his age, he would have to recognize that his last chance had gone. Surely he would have to give up.
So I decided to wait, as patiently as I could.
But the affair of the obituary at breakfast came as something of a jolt. Once, on an earlier occasion of the sort, I had remarked that at least he could count on a certain amount of recognition in his own obituary.
I suppose it wasn’t a very clever remark, but t en my remarks ne er are. I had meant it to be lighthearted, to pull him out of a gathermg depression during which I knew, from experience, he would be most intolerable.
And perhaps there had been a little unconscious spite in it, too. I cannot honestly say.
At any rate, he turned full on me. His lean body shook and his dark eyebrows pulled down over his deep-set eyes as he shrieked at me in falsetto, ‘But I’ll never read my obituary. I’ll be deprived even.of that.’
And he spat at me. He deliberately spat at me.
I ran to my bedroom.
He never apologized, but after a few days in which I avoided him completely, we carried on our frigid life as before. Neither of us ever referred to the incident.
Now there was another obituary.
Somehow, as I sat there alone at the breakfast table, I felt it to be the last straw for him, the climax of his long-drawn-out failure.
I could sense a crisis coming and didn’t know whether to fear or welcome it. Perhaps, on the whole, I would welcome it. Any change could not fail to be a change for the. better.
Shortly before lunch, he came upon me in the living room, where a basket of unimportant sewing gave my hands something to do and a bit of television occupied my mind.
He said abruptly, ‘I will need your help.’
It had been twenty years or more since he had said anything like that and involuntarily I thawed toward him. He looked unhealthily excited. There was a flush on his ordinarily pale cheeks.
I said, ‘Gladly, if there’s something I can do for you.’
‘There is. I have given rpy assistants a month’s vacation. They will leave Saturday and after that you and I will work alone in the laboratory. I tell you now so that you will refrain from making any other arrangements for the coming week.’
I shriveled a bit. ‘But Lancelot, you know I can’t help you with your work. I don’t understand—’
‘I know that,’ he said with complete contempt, ‘but you don’t have to understand my work. You need only follow a few simple instructions and follow them carefully. The point is that I have discovered something, finally, which will put me where I belong—’
‘Oh, Lancelot,’ I said involuntarily, for I had heard this before a number of times.
‘Listen to me, you fool, and for once try to behave like an adult. This time I have done it. No one can anticipate me this time because my discovery is based on such an unorthodox concept that no physicist alive, except me, is genius enough to think of it, not for a generation at least. And when my work bursts on the world, I could be recognized as the greatest name of all time in science.’
‘I’m sure I’m very glad for you, Lancelot.’
‘I said I could be recognized. I could not be, also. There is a great deal of injustice in the assignment of scientific credit. I’ve learned that often enough. So it will not be enough merely to announce the discovery. If I do, everyone will crowd into the field and after a while I’ll just be a name in the history books, with glory spread out over a number of Johnny-come-latelies.’
I think the only reason he was talking to me then, three days before he could get to work on whatever it was he planned to do, was that he could no longer contain himself. He bubbled over and I was the only one who was nonentity enough to be witness to that.
