Percival's Planet: A Novel

Byers, Michael

ISBN 10: 1400148413 ISBN 13: 9781400148417

Publisher: Tantor Audio, 2010

Synopsis

In 1928, the boy who will discover Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh, is on the family farm, grinding a lens for his own telescope under the immense Kansas sky. In Flagstaff, Arizona, the staff of Lowell Observatory is about to resume the late Percival Lowell's interrupted search for Planet X. Meanwhile, the immensely rich heir to a chemical fortune has decided to go west to hunt for dinosaurs, and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the most beautiful girl in America is going slowly insane while her ex-heavyweight champion boyfriend stands by helplessly, desperate to do anything to keep her.

Inspired by the true story of Tombaugh and set in the last gin-soaked months of the flapper era, Percival's Planet tells the story of the intertwining lives of half a dozen dreamers, schemers, and madmen. Following Tombaugh's unlikely path from son of a farmer to discoverer of a planet, the novel touches on insanity, mathematics, music, astrophysics, boxing, dinosaur hunting, shipwrecks-and what happens when the greatest romance of your life is also the source of your life's greatest sorrow.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Byers is the author of the story collection The Coast of Good Intentions, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the acclaimed novel Long for This World, winner of the First Novel Award from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

STELLAFANE
1990

The astronomer's wife is on her knees in the garden, facing away from him, stabbing at the soil with a silver trowel, her head covered with a big straw gardener's hat that is in fact a thrift- store sombrero whose dangly felt pompoms she long ago snipped off. During the winter when the garden is mostly dormant the mutilated sombrero lives on a hook in the laundry room, and it is one of the trusty signs of spring that Patsy has taken it down and pulled its little beaded cinch snug around her jaw and bulled her way out into the yard in just a track suit, despite Clyde's mild suggestions that it might be too early. Clyde is a sort of worrier, it must be said, but not so much that he is moved to go outside to help her. Besides, he gets cold easily now (he is eighty-four) and the cartilage in his knees is mostly gone, so that from time to time through the usual ache will come a spike of pain, always accompanied by the same musical, ivory klok of bone meeting bone. Instead he watches her from the kitchen table, where he is sitting with a glass of water and a small, colorful arrangement of pebbly pills, as bright as aquarium gravel, and with the afternoon's mail stacked in front of him. Their kitchen is dark, paneled in fake pine, and the appliances are the avocado green that was once stylish but which is now a source of cringing embarrassment to their daughter, Jean, who cannot help herself from picking at the Formica countertops when she comes to visit. "It's so dingy," she tells them, but Clyde can't see it. Well: doesn't care. He finds his kitchen fine as it is. From his seat he can see the garden and the neighbor's high paling fence threaded with the mean whips of bougainvillea and the giant primary-blue sky of March in New Mexico. And he can keep an eye on Patsy, in case she needs him.

He makes his way through the mail, pressing out the creases in the bills and paying them, one at a time, from the checkbook, keeping the balance in the register as he goes and setting the used envelopes aside to serve, later, once they have been scissored into squares, as scratch paper for telephone messages. (This also drives Jean around the bend, her father's habitual and unnecessary and, it seems, aggressive frugality. In private Clyde admits to himself that he takes some goading pleasure in what it produces in Jean, her dependable fury, her outraged sadness at her fading parents—well, it is what they have between them, it is better than nothing.)

The mail is bills and advertisements and nothing unusual; and then, like the prize in a box of Cracker Jack, at the bottom of the stack of mail he finds an invitation to speak at Stellafane, a society of amateur telescope makers, who convene an annual meeting in Vermont. He is still occasionally invited to things like this, but since most people suppose he is dead it does not happen as often as it used to. The invitation is for July.

He goes out into the garden, holding the letter, bright in the sun.

"Well," Patsy tells him, "that's very nice."

"I think I'm going to go."

"All right." She settles back on her haunches. "You ought to find somebody to travel with."

"You could come."

"Pfah. Not on your life. That crew." She means the enthusiasts and hobbyists who have made such a pet of her husband over the years. It is not jealousy but its opposite, the conviction they do not appreciate him sufficiently. Clyde likes this position, secretly shares it, and makes a feeble show of pretending otherwise. "What about Sarah?" she suggests.

"Well—if she'd want to."

"She might." She drives her trowel into the crunching soil. "Help me up," she says, and extends an arm. "We'll go call her."

Sarah is their granddaughter, their only grandchild. In 1990 she is twenty- two, having graduated the previous spring from Indiana University in Bloomington. She is still living in Bloomington, working in the IU botany lab studying grains and grasses. As it turns out she is pleased to travel with her grandfather, of whom she is simply and excellently fond. Besides seeming to like him for himself, she is of the opinion that having Clyde Tombaugh as her grandfather is a cool and incidentally useful thing. When she is out to impress a boy or make herself feel better about something, she has him to resort to, the story of Planet X. Clyde enjoys holding this position in Sarah's life, which feels like something resembling his due. His granddaughter doesn't know the whole story, of course, which is just as well. For certain reasons of his own, he has never told her the whole story.

For that matter he has never told Patsy the whole story either. Or anyone.

Sarah arrives in Albuquerque in the middle of July. She resembles Clyde, in parts: she has his narrow shoulders, his blunt squarish head smoothly indented in places like a salt lick, his very white skin cool to the touch. All her own is the knowing stance, the tilt of the head down and to the side, and with this a habit of observing you through her hair with an air of tolerant skepticism. What in her mother is harried and punishing is in Sarah set back and noncommittal. But when she smoothes her hair from her forehead and puts it behind her sizable ears, you can be sure she is about to tell you something you don't necessarily want to hear. You can't fool Sarah.

On the flight to Boston, Clyde has the window seat and Sarah sits beside him. She has a new boyfriend, she informs him: Dave, a graduate student in the Indiana music conservatory. "Guess what instrument."

"Piano," Clyde says.

"No."

"I wanted to learn the piano once," he tells her.

"Guess again."

"Flute."

"No."

"Triangle," Clyde says.

"No." She bats him. "He's not gay."

"Well, I don't know. Guitar."

"Tuba!" She leans away from him, grimacing, horrified. "Can you believe that? What's wrong with him?"

"Somebody has to play it."

"Not necessarily. I went to a recital and he played a piece called something like Dance for Three Tubas. He couldn't find two other people in the world who played tuba, I guess, so he played the other two parts himself and taped them and then played the last part live on stage! By himself!"

"There must be other tuba players in the music school."

She hefts herself upright. "I don't know. He has to lug the thing around with him everywhere, in that giant case. It's like having the most enormous dog."

He is not very good at this, but sensing that Patsy would want to know he asks, "So, do you like him?"

"Oh, I love him." She grins. "He's ridiculous. He has a little tiny Honda Civic that he rides around in with his great big tuba. And," she finishes, "he's from Canada."

The talk he will give at Stellafane is the same one, really, that he has always given, amended marginally to account for differing audiences. The version he has written out for this trip is for the telescope makers, the tinkerers. They cannot really imagine what it was like to grind a nine-inch mirror themselves, in the middle of Kansas, in 1928, with the materials he had at hand. But he wants to give them a little bit of an idea. "Read my talk," he says to Sarah. He tugs the pages from his satchel and hands them across to her. It is handwritten in his tidy blue script, a few pages. She turns them over silently.

When she finishes she says, "I always forget how young you were."

"Twenty-two," he says. Then, realizing it: "As old as you are, in fact."

She hands him the papers. "I guess that makes me a dud."

"Well, that's—" He shakes his head. It is too wrong for words. "No."

"No, I'm sort of, you know—joking. Sort of! Maybe. I don't know. I'm just—" She reaches into her own satchel and tugs out a Walkman. She unwinds the cord from the earphones, inserts the jack into the tape player, and places the earphones over his ears. She presses play.

He hears tuba music, oomphing and bumbling, elephants in tutus. Her face is alive with embarrassed delight.

"Isn't that ridiculous," she says.

By the time they land in Boston his knees are so sore he asks Sarah to fetch a wheelchair. It is only slightly humiliating to be wheeled by his granddaughter through the terminal. This nice girl is mine, he wants to crow. He satisfies himself with the envying glances of other fogies in their chairs, pushed by indifferent airport workers in untucked blue shirts, name tags flapping. No one will spill him onto the concourse linoleum like a sack of potatoes.

They rent a car and head north, away from the rosy brick-and-glass towers of Boston, north through Massachusetts and into New Hampshire. Sarah drives while Clyde watches the countryside. He has never been to New Hampshire, and he is pleased to see that it looks more or less as he has imagined it. It is late afternoon, warm, verging on evening, and the orange summer light leans over fieldstone barns and farmhouses until these give way in turn to long stretches of silent dark forest. The road is narrow, the painted lines nearly worn away. A first star comes out: Deneb, bright point of the summer triangle. The sky is purple above the trees.

Stellafane is just over the Vermont border, a little encampment in the woods. A sign at the gate reads please only parking lights after dark. They creep up the dirt road, under the pine trees, then emerge onto an open hillside under the stars. Dozens, hundreds of people, it would seem: red- capped flashlights are bobbing everywhere. At the top of the hill stands a timbered house, pink in the glow of their parking lights. "That's where we're supposed to check in," he says.

"You sit," Sarah insists, and hops out and prances around the front fender and disappears inside. There is a flash of light, a glimpse of a desk, a bulletin board pinned with papers. A minute later she emerges with a bearded, wild-haired man, exactly the sort Patsy dislikes, in a dark ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Tantor Audio
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1400148413
• ISBN 13: 9781400148417
• Binding: Audio CD