Lore Segal

THE OLD HYDROLOGIST

Memory is the writer’s sketchbook. I remember an afternoon in the seventies, in Washington. A friend and I had lunch together, had some good wine, and then we went to see the Klees at The Phillips Collection. I recollect a feeling like being in love.

Came a time when it seemed as if the glass in my glasses might be interfering between me and what I saw. Outlines blurred and black was not black—not black enough. I asked my eye doctor if anything could be done, and he told me to come and see him in three months. When I returned in three months, he said for me to come back in another three months.

It put me in mind of another long-ago afternoon when I was a child in wartime England. Miss Ellis, my foster mother, had offered my help to a local scientist whose name I have no hope of remembering. Miss Ellis said, “Many years ago he wrote a book which he wants to update for a new edition. He is old and needs help making the changes. He’s a hydrologist.”

“He’s a what?” I asked.

It was the elderly wife who opened the front door. She led me into a darkened room and showed me to a chair at a table covered with a dark, figured cloth and a lot of books, pencils, and paper. Never very alert to the world of smells, I recall the used-up air on my left where the bearded old man sat bending over a page with a large, round magnifying glass. He said, “They skimped on the ink in the last edition. The print is too pale. I can’t make out if this says 6% or 8%?”

“Says 3%,” I told him.

“3% is correct,” he said. “Will you start reading from here?”

I read, “The runoff on 3% of the surface in relation to the 30% typical of catastrophic flooding of 97% of the larger surfaces . . .” I’m reaching back to remember what I did not understand at the time.

The wife came in to put a shawl around the old man’s shoulders and asked me if I would like a cup of tea.

The old hydrologist told me to write what he was going to dictate. “These deeply fragmented and profoundly altered moraines…” he dictated.

“…more rains?” I asked.

“…moraines,” he said.

“…profoundly altered more rains,” I wrote.

“…and the debris of boulders ground to glacial flour,” he dictated.

I stopped writing. “…glacial flowers?” I asked.

“Flower” is what I thought he said. “Flower, flower. Glacial flower.”

The wife came with a cup of tea for me and a plate of biscuits.

We sat side by side in the shuttered room that afternoon, at the table with the figured cloth, the old hydrologist in his late eighties, I imagine, with his white fringed Santa beard, and I, a curly-headed twelve-maybe-thirteen-year-old, helpless, the two of us together. When he bent over the page and could not read what he had written, I felt bad for him. I would have liked to do what he needed from me if I had known what and how.

Came the time for me to leave, the old hydrologist shook my hand goodbye. I remember his smile. It spoke the defeat of resignation. When I looked back from the door, he was bent over a page of his writing that he could not see to read.

His wife took me to the front door and paid me what must have been agreed with Miss Ellis.

*

And another afternoon, at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. I am in my nineties. The year is 2020. I walk into the room to the left of the Great Hall and find the glass case with my favorite statuette. It is a Greek geometric, some four inches high, said to represent a fight between Man and Centaur. I will not believe that they are fighting and switch for a closer look from my long-distance to my reading glasses, both of which I wear on a string around my neck. What I think I see is the man putting a hand of friendship on the centaur’s shoulder. Let me see if I will see better without my glasses, but I already know that there is no longer any seeing better.

The following week COVID-19 shuts down the museum for the months to come, and it will be safer for us not to take one another by the hand.

LORE SEGAL (1928–2024) was a novelist, translator, and writer of children’s books. Her novels include Other People’s Houses, serialized in The New Yorker; Her First American, which won an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; and Shakespeare’s Kitchen, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.