Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

The bottom line was that the ability to run a house in the way Grandma was legendary or infamous for doing, to keep the personal grooming up to that standard, to send out a few hundred Christmas cards every year, each written in flawless fountain-pen longhand, etc., etc., that all of these things taken together took up as much space in her brain as, say mathematics might take up in a theoretical physicist's.

And so when it came to anything of a practical nature she was perfectly helpless, and probably always had been. Until she had gotten too old to drive, she had continued to tool around Whitman in the 1965 Lincoln Continental, which was the last vehicle her husband had purchased, from Whitman's Patterson Lincoln-Mercury, before his untimely death. The vehicle weighed something like six thousand pounds and had more moving parts than a silo full of Swiss watches. Whenever any of her offspring came to visit, someone would discreetly slip out to the garage to yank the dipstick, which would always be mysteriously topped up with clear amber-colored 10W40. It eventually turned out that her late husband had summoned the entire living male lineage of the Patterson family—four generations of them—into his hospital room and gathered them around his deathbed and wrought some kind of unspecified pact with them along the general lines of that, if at any point in the future, the tire pressure in the Lincoln dropped below spec or the maintenance in any other way lapsed, all of the Pattersons would not merely sacrifice their immortal souls, but literally be pulled out of meetings or lavatories and dragged off to hell on the spot, like Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. He knew that his wife had only the vaguest idea of what a tire was, other than something that from time to time a man would heroically jump out of the car and change while she sat inside the car admiring him. The world of physical objects seemed to have been made solely for the purpose of giving the men around Grandma something to do with their hands; and not, mind you, for any practical reason, but purely so that Grandma could twiddle those men's emotional knobs by reacting to how well or poorly they did it. Which was a fine setup as long as men were actually around, but not so good after Grandpa died. So guerilla mechanic teams had been surveilling Randy's grandmother ever since and occasionally swiping her Lincoln from the church parking lot on Sunday mornings and taking it down to Patterson's for sub rosa oil changes. The ability of the Lincoln to run flawlessly for a quarter of a century without maintenance—without even putting gasoline in the tank—had only confirmed Grandmother's opinions about the amusing superfluity of male pursuits.

In any event, what it all came down to was that Grandma, whose grasp of practical matters had only declined (if that was even possible) with advanced age, was not the sort of person you would go to for information about her late husband's war record. Defeating the Nazis was in the same category as changing a flat tire: an untidy business that men were expected to know how to do. And not just the men of yore, the supermen of her generation; Randy was expected to know about these things too. If the Axis reconstituted itself tomorrow, Grandma would expect Randy to be suited up behind the controls of a supersonic fighter plane the day after that. And Randy would sooner spiral into the ground at Mach 2 than bear her tidings that he wasn't up to the job.

Luckily for Randy, who has recently become intensely curious about Grandpa, an old suitcase has been unearthed. It's a rattan-and-leather thing, sort of a snappy Roaring Twenties number complete with some badly abraded hotel stickers plotting Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse's migration from the Midwest to Princeton and back—which is completely filled with small black-and-white photographs. Randy's father dumps the contents out on a ping-pong table that inexplicably sits in the center of the rec room at Grandma's managed care facility, whose residents are about as likely to play ping-pong as they are to get their nipples pierced. The photos are messed out into several discrete piles which are in turn sorted through by Randy and his father and his aunts and uncles. Most of them are photos of the Waterhouse kids, so everyone's fascinated until they have found pictures of themselves at a couple of different ages. Then the pile of photos begins to look depressingly large. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse was evidently a shutterbug of sorts and now his offspring are paying the price.

Randy has a different set of motives, and so he stays there late, going through pictures by himself. Ninety-nine out of a hundred are snapshots of Waterhouse brats from the 1950s. But some are older. He finds a photo of Grandpa in a place with palm trees, in a military uniform, with a big white disk-shaped officer's cap on his head. Three hours later he comes across a picture of a very young Grandpa, really just a turkey-necked adolescent costumed in grownup clothes, standing in front of a gothic building with two other men: a grinning dark-haired chap who looks vaguely familiar, and an aquiline blond fellow in rimless glasses. All three men have bicycles; Grandpa is straddling his, and the other two, perhaps considering this to be not so dignified, are supporting theirs with their hands. Another hour goes by, and then there's Grandpa in a khaki uniform with more palm trees in the background.

The next morning he sits down next to his grandmother, after she has finished her daily hourlong getting-out-of-bed ritual. “Grandmother, I found these two old photographs.” He deals them out on the table in front of her and gives her a few moments to switch contexts. Grandma doesn't turn on a dime conversationally, and besides, those stiff old-lady corneas take a little while to shift focus.

“Yes, these are both Lawrence when he was in the service.” Grandmother has always had this knack for telling people the obvious in a way that is scrupulously polite but that makes the recipient feel like a butthead for having wasted her time. By this point she is obviously tired of IDing photographs, a tedious job with an obvious subtext of “you're going to die soon and we were curious—who is this lady standing next to the Buick?”

“Grandmother,” Randy says brightly, trying to rouse her interest, “in this photo here, he is wearing a Navy uniform. And in this photo here, he is wearing an Army uniform.”

Grandma Waterhouse raises her eyebrows and looks at him with the synthetic interest she would use if she were at a formal affair of some kind, and some man she'd just met tried to give her a tutorial on tire-changing.

“It is, uh, I think, kind of unusual,” Randy says, “for a man to be in both the Army and the Navy during the same war. Usually it's one or the other.”

“Lawrence had both an Army uniform and a Navy uniform,” Grandmother says, in the same tone she'd used to say he had both a small intestine and a large intestine, “and he would wear whichever one was appropriate.”

“Of course he would,” Randy says.

The laminar wind is gliding over the highway like a crisp sheet being stripped from a bed, and Randy's finding it hard to keep the Acura on the pavement. The wind isn't strong enough to blow the car around, but it obscures the edges of the road; all he can see is this white, striated plane sliding laterally beneath him. His eye tells him to steer into it, which would be a bad idea since it would take him and Amy straight into the lava fields. He tries to focus on a distant point: the white diamond of Mount Rainier, a couple of hundred kilometers west.

“I don't even know when they got married,” Randy says. “Isn't that horrible?”

“September of 1945,” Amy says. “I dragged it out of her.”

“Wow.”