Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

A: A "catch" is a form of musical round where identical voices enter at different times. The catch to a catch is that it is printed on one solo line. In the past, as a party game, singers would sight-read from catch collections, each group responsible for figuring out when to "make the catch," when to come in at the proper moment. Making the catch reached its peak of popularity under England's Charles II. The phrase may have originated earlier. Rounds in general are at least as old as the thirteenth-century tune "Summer Is Icumen In."

I stopped, realizing I was straying from the point, that summer was already two weeks gone. As the submitter had not deigned to sign the question, I left my answer similarly anonymous. The pair are both still on file that way. As I held the cards next to one another, checking my work, I knew I would not, contrary to all I'd ever assumed, remain a librarian forever.

Canon at Unison

My old associates threw me a going-away party today. It was, as going-away parties go, a bad mix of parting embarrassment and exhilaration. For want of a more plausible story, I spread the word around the branch that I am going back to school. Loosely interpreted, never a lie. The celebration was a sorry affair. Several colleagues brought homemade cookies, which nobody's diet permitted. We broke the rules and served Chablis in paper cups; everyone partook dutifully, in professional moderation. Separation — life's major emotion — is being slowly written out of our repertoire. A few friends will genuinely miss me, and I them. My buddy Mr. Scott, he of the eternal retirement threat, came up to me late in the afternoon, making no effort to disguise his eyes. "You beat me to it," he said, shaking his head. "I can't believe you beat me."

"I'm afraid I'm abandoning you, friend. Fight the good fight." Before I could get all the way through the sentence, he swept me up in an embrace, which we held for a long time by contemporary standards. Close to his ear, before pulling away from it for good, I whispered, "Work forever."

We all made the standard plans to stay in touch, plans we knew, even as we made them, would atrophy for no reason. As a gag gift, the collected staff presented me with a wrapped Facts on File binder stuffed with miscellaneous soap-opera synopses, gov pubs, library memos, and those You-Are-Next fliers collected from the prophets of apocalypse who hang around Grand Central. Then they presented me with my own copy of the Times Atlas. The combination of my long-expressed girlish delight in the book, the misplaced earnestness of the staff, and the hopeless ambition of the atlas itself — the simple description of how to get anywhere in the world — caught inside me. Seeing the effect the atlas had on me, my friends broke up the party.

As ironic token of affection, the staff let me have a last go at the Quote Board and Event Calendar. "Made me" might be more accurate. The work was more than I wanted to take on today, but I appreciated the gesture. For tomorrow's Today, I chose the Homestead Strike: the fifth day's clash between five thousand steel-workers and Prick's three hundred Pinkertons. I avoided my habit of extending the fact into exposition or mouthing my usual guarded meliorism. I wish I hadn't chosen that particular event; I'd hate to suggest that I've left on a labor dispute. But done is done. For my last ever selection for quote of the day, I posted vintage W.C. Fields:

It's a funny little world. A man's lucky if he gets out of it alive.

My final official act at the branch was to sort the unbound issues of Congressional Quarterly, which some malicious cit had mixed up beyond recognition. Alexandria arranged its scrolls by size— an order useless except to the initiated. The race's chief discovery may well be the idea that even a perfect stranger could retrieve things from parchments, given the sequence. Filing was a bit below my skills, but it was basically what I did for a living, until today. And in truth, returning the CQs to useful order gave me the thrill of send-off. I was packing my bags, feeling my freedom. I took a last look around my stacks. The collection suddenly seemed wonderful beyond naming. I had for a time lived here. Then I snapped the binders shut and was gone.

Today in History

A postcard arrived today. A fifty-cent picture and message, and for a moment this morning it seemed I would not be cut off from all word from Franklin. Nothing for almost a year, then four lines of friend's postmortem. A few weeks later, a postcard making no attempt to explain the gap or give any idea of how he is. A fair sample of the man's communication. Still, I was glad for even this scrap. I remain one of those unreformable suckers who want to hear, just hear from time to time, even if the point of hearing has long since disappeared. The card carried a pastel foreign-denomination stamp complete with obligatory royal sovereign. Frank writes:

One cannot, I suppose, traffic in Flemish masterpieces without a passing knowledge of Vlaams. And as a beautiful woman not unlike yourself once taught me, the only way to learn a foreign language, natuurlijk, is total immersion. Flanders seems the likely place. I could live for years on new vocabulary alone. Eenvoudig = one + folded = simple. Uiteraard = out of the earth = obvious. And those just the adjectives! Invigorating, learning a second tongue. (Invigorating to have twigged a first one.) The doors that new words are opening right now! This man has spent sorrows, lacks no delight, has hoard and horses and hall joys and all a lord is allowed had he his woman with him. FTODD

On the card, a late-gothic village, purportedly in the rolling geest of Northern Europe but more likely, given the crags looming in the background, situated just south of the painter's frontal lobes. Tempera and oil on panel, it has that gessoed, patient, long-suffering look that only painters in that part of the world, in that century, knew how to make. Ephemeral transfusion of light through foliage, discontinuous brushstrokes, the countryside's green shading into azure and aquamarine color-freeze the village in escapist fantasy. The town is more familiar to me than my own childhood. Ground mineral, egg yolk, oil, chalk, varnish: an organic cupboard exudes a lost landscape that would be heart-balm to look at, were he not in it.

I hardly needed to check the attribution: Herri met de Bles, an itinerant early-sixteenth-century painter so obscure as to be almost apocryphal. Franklin has been trying to write a dissertation on the artist for years, searching for sufficient motivation to produce a treatise of interest only to a dozen specialists in the world. He nibbled at the project, two years stretching into four. Procrastination at last exhausted his assistantship money at Columbia. With the project still hanging over him, finance forced him into night-shift data operations.

Franker spoke of his halted work, his failed scholarly biography, the second night we went out. "The son of a bitch had a bouquet of names. Herri. Henri. Civetta. De Bles. De Dinant. At least two places of birth and half a dozen birthdates. Circa 1500; emphasis on circa. Half the paintings attributed to him probably aren't his while half of the ones he did paint are probably attributed to somebody else. Not a single signed or attested work. May have been a pupil of Patinir; emphasis on may. May have been his nephew. Christ; I don't even know if I'm dealing with one guy or three."

I watched his fingers, strangely entwined. His distress, lovely dressing, was just more flavor for that moment. "His works must be very moving," I at last said.

"Why do you say that?" At that suspicious snap, the evening changed, modulated into harsher places. Todd's unkindnesses tore down pathways he himself couldn't anticipate or steer. I learned that only by stages.