The Unseen World Read Online Free PDF

Portuguese. “A well-rounded thinker should be able to puzzle out from scratch any proof that has ever been proven,” he said to Ada, and so sometimes to keep sharp he wouldwork out some problem of physics or mathematics, although it had nothing to do with his research. When he was working on these, or on any puzzle, he would fall into a trance familiar to his closest associates—in which his body seemed utterly, utterly at the will of his mind—in which his hands, writing furiously, seemed overtaken by a ghost. He was expressionless, an automaton, and could not be spoken to until he returned. On the occasions when, in one of these trances, he worked himself to sleep, Ada put a hand on his shoulder—one of the few times she ever touched her father—and he sat up and blinked, disoriented, until he realized where he was.
    Her father spoke of his past only rarely, but occasionally he would agree to tell Ada the tale of his life as a story before bed. She begged him to: it was a way of expanding her family, a way to counteract the feeling she sometimes had that the two of them were stranded on an island. To comfort herself, Ada sometimes narrated his life in her head, using the wording he would have used.
    David was born in New York City, he told her, the only child of wealthy parents to whom he would eventually stop speaking. They died before Ada was born. He described them with bitterness and scorn, ridiculing their conventionality, their closed-mindedness, their snobbery. (Ada did not point out to her father, though it occurred to her, that many of his opinions could be labeled snobbery as well; and that his last name, well known in the Northeast, had opened various doors for him that he seemed not to notice.) The rift between David and his parents, which led at last to a complete estrangement by his late twenties, was caused by differences of opinion regarding how he should live his life— the phrase he always used. He hinted vaguely at their displeasure at his choice of career, his refusal to accept their introductions to the various young ladies they would have liked to see him marry, his refusal to obey the conventions and codes that accompanied the family’s status. “Debutantes and that sort of thing,” said David. “Charity balls. Teas .” At the mention of these terms he wouldshudder, which signified an end to the story. Ada rarely pressed him beyond this point.
    The derisive, sardonic tone he used when speaking of his past implied he had long ago moved on, had long ago dismissed those families and their ilk as fraudulent and obsolete. From his scraps of description Ada gathered that his mother and father were stern and impersonal. Worse than that, she categorized them as uncreative—David’s term, one he used only for those he held in complete disdain. His father had been a sort of gentleman attorney, one who only took on clients who were personal friends, and only then if he could be sure the work would end amicably. His mother had no career aside from identifying and articulating the flaws of her husband and son. Every conversation with her, he told Ada, was like a game of chess: one had to remain several steps ahead of her to ward off whatever criticism would be imparted if one’s guard was let down.
    In these moments Ada was jolted by a sudden vision of David as a child, subservient to his parents, not the master and commander of everything around him, as she’d thought of him for most of her childhood. It was difficult to picture.
    This much she knew: David was raised on Gramercy Park in a grand and beautiful row home, up which ivy spread densely and then in rivulets, like fingers from a palm. She saw it once a year, in winter, when David took her for a weekend trip to New York City for Calvary Episcopal’s annual Christmas concert. It was his childhood church—the only site from his childhood that he ever wished to revisit—and it was his