State of Wonder

by Ann Patchett

  Nancy Saturn smeared a great handful of white paste across her face and began to rub it in. “To know Martin Rapp was to know Annick Swenson.”

  “Don’t ruin the story,” Alan said to her. He turned his attention back to Marina, that untapped source of listening pleasure. “Annick is several years older than I am, of course.” This news was delivered for his own vanity, as Alan Saturn, with his thinning white hair, enormous white eyebrows, and perilously slender ankles, could easily have been taken as older than Dr. Swenson. The only thing that made Dr. Saturn seem younger was his younger wife. “She was coming down here years before me. They were, shall we say, quite inseparable in the field.”

  “She picked the boys who went on the trips,” Nancy said. “Only boys. She held interviews in his office at Harvard. She was the one who picked Alan. Dr. Rapp didn’t have the time to fill the rosters himself.”

  Marina could see him then, a tall and lanky undergraduate, a canvas rucksack on his back. “You knew him too?” she asked Nancy.

  Nancy gave a small, snorting laugh and applied a layer of sunblock to her breastbone, reaching into the collar of her shirt to do the job right. “I came after Dr. Rapp.”

  Alan Saturn was ignoring her now. He was launched. A giant tree had fallen into the river and the roots and branches reached up through the water as if begging to be saved. A bright yellow bird with a long, slender neck sat on one of those branches and watched the boat as it passed. Benoit, having spotted the bird, began his frantic turning of pages. “Martin Rapp was more than my teacher. He was the man I wanted to be. He was fully engaged with his life every minute that he lived it. He didn’t trudge along doing what someone else told him to do. He was never a cog in the wheel. He held his head up and looked at the world around him. Now, my father was a very decent man, worked as a tailor in Detroit back when there were men in Detroit who had their suits made. He worked until his hands were so twisted with arthritis he couldn’t hold a needle. If a man came into the store and told my father what he wanted, the only word my father had for him was yes. It didn’t matter if it was a ridiculous order, didn’t matter if this guy showed up on Saturday morning and wanted his suit for Saturday night and there was already work piled to the rafters, my father said yes. And once my father said yes it was as good as done because that word was all he had in the world. He spent his life in the backroom of a store and the only thing he knew about his environment was that needle going in and out of the cloth. He did all this so my brothers and I could go to college and not be tailors and have the luxury of telling somebody no someday. So off I went to Harvard, the tailor’s boy from Michigan. The next thing I knew I was sitting in a lecture hall and in walked the great Martin Rapp, his ankle sunk in a plaster boot, his crutches swinging forward. He came up to the lectern and he said, ‘Gentlemen, close your books and listen. We have nothing less than the world to consider.’ We were awestruck, every last one of us. We would have sat there for the full four years of college. I remember everything about that day, that room, the giant blackboards, the light coming in those leaded glass windows. What I saw in front of me was the character of a man. It was the most remarkable thing, and I’ve never had that experience before or since. It was some sort of aura he had. From ten rows away I knew exactly who he was and I knew I would follow him anywhere.”

  “Here,” Nancy said to Marina, “take the sunblock and give me the bug gel.”

  Marina took the sunblock but there was only so much sunblock could do. As careful as she had tried to be she was as dark as the natives now. Her own mother wouldn’t recognize her.

  “Listen to her,” Alan said, declining to take the paste himself. “We didn’t have sunblock back then. It was a melanoma that killed Dr. Rapp in the end. By the time they found it, it had spread everywhere there was for a melanoma to go. I cannot imagine all the years he spent in an open boat with no more than a straw hat and a white shirt for protection. It’s amazing he lasted as long as he did. I came back to Cambridge to see him in the end and he was every bit himself. He was interested in his own death, fascinated by it. He was taking notes. He was in his eighties then, he couldn’t go out to the sites anymore. When I asked him if he still did his meditation he said to me, ‘Why would this time be any different?’ That was the thing most people never knew about him: if he was in his house in Cambridge or he was in a tent in the driving rain outside Iquitos, he always meditated, and that’s back in the days when only a handful of Indians and maybe a few Tibetans had even heard the word. He used to say we all had a compass inside of us and what we needed to do was to find it and to follow it. But we were undergraduates and for the most part we couldn’t find our asses with our hands and so we followed his compass instead. Until we knew how to be men by our own standards we tried to be men like Dr. Rapp. We never would be, of course, but it was still a noble goal. I look out over this river now and I can see him, paddling the canoe along with the rest of us. In fact we would have stopped paddling, crying like children about our blisters and our splinters, and he would just keep on. He wouldn’t say a word and then all of a sudden he would turn the boat so hard we would nearly capsize. He would take it to shore and the next thing we knew he was in the water and then into the jungle, gone. Gone! And there we were, alone. Ten minutes later he’d walk back out with a mushroom in a bag, a specimen that had never been recorded before. He’d be writing up the coordinates and taking pictures of the site, and then he was cleaning off the knife he’d used to cut the mushrooms from the tree on his handkerchief, the surest sign that the discovery was now complete. Everything he did was orchestrated, every movement was beautiful. We boys would scramble into the jungle trying to figure out what he’d seen and how he’d known those mushrooms were there, and when we’d ask him he would say, ‘I keep my eyes open.’ ” Alan Saturn was moved by the memory. “ ‘I keep my eyes open.’ That was the lesson. I have to tell you those were the happiest summers of my life.”

  Looking along the edges of the river in the blinding daylight, the mesh of the jungle as tight as twenty chain-link fences stacked together, Marina could imagine that reaching in to pluck a single mushroom from the forest floor must have been an act akin to pulling a full grown sheep from a top hat, at once dazzling and pointless. Easter turned back from the steering wheel of the boat and waved to her. Benoit looked for birds in the trees.

  “So why didn’t you go back with him after that?”

  “Malaria,” Alan said, and gave a sigh for the memory of what he had lost. “I got it in Peru the summer after my junior year. Dr. Rapp had had malaria who knows how many times. He said I’d pull through it fine, but I didn’t do so well. After I got home I ended up having to sit out the first semester of my senior year. By the time the summer came around again and Dr. Rapp was putting his crew together I was probably back to ninety-five percent but my father wouldn’t let me go. I shouldn’t blame him, I suppose. He thought he was protecting me, and I couldn’t make him understand. My father had never seen the world so he didn’t think it was much of a crime to keep me from it.”

  Nancy Saturn looked at her husband, great streaks of unabsorbed white paste still standing on her chin and around her ears. She waited for another minute to see if there was anything else forthcoming and then she asked him, “Finished?”

  “Those are some highlights,” he said.

  “As many times as I’ve heard this story there are two things that never sit well with me,” she said.

  “Tell me,” Alan said.

  “Well, first, your poor father. Why must he always be made the drudge in opposition to the free spirit of Martin Rapp? He didn’t want his son who still had occasional relapses of malaria to return to the jungle where he’d gotten it in the first place? That doesn’t seem so criminal to me.”

  Alan Saturn considered his wife thoughtfully for some time, chewing over her criticism. He brushed some sort of leggy cricket out of his hair. “You have a valid point,” he
said finally. “But this is the story of my life, the story of how I related to my father and then later to my mentor, who, it is obvious enough, was a father figure to me. I’m not misrepresenting my father. I say he’s a hard worker, a provider. But if I lean towards Dr. Rapp as a role model then that’s my choice to make.”

  Nancy waited a long time before shrugging her shoulders. The shrug appeared to cost her something. “I can see that.”

  “I hear you, though,” he said. “And I appreciate what you’re saying.”

  Marina wondered if they had been through a great deal of marriage counseling or if it was possible that this was the way they had spoken to each other all along. It was such a long time ago that she had been married. She couldn’t imagine she and Josh Su had, in their twenties, ever had such an exchange.

  “You said there were two things,” Alan said.

  “Annick Swenson.”

  “She isn’t in the story.”

  “She is implicit in every story about Dr. Rapp. Your story tells as much by what you leave out as what you put in.”

  “I leave out what was private in his life. Those matters didn’t concern me and they didn’t concern science.”

  “Listen to him,” the second Dr. Saturn said, turning to Marina. “What is this, Meet the Press?” She pivoted back to her husband. “It absolutely did concern you. When one’s role model brings his mistress along trip after trip with a dozen boys and you are one of those boys then it concerns you. It concerns you when you later go to his house and have dinner with your mentor and his wife.”

  “Dr. Swenson was his mistress?” Marina said. Just saying it brought a sour taste to her mouth. It was, she thought, a terrible word, and in no way representative. A mistress was a woman who waited in a hotel room.

  “This is what I meant by private,” Alan said pointedly to his wife.

  “Mrs. Rapp lives in Cambridge and has three daughters. She is ninety-two. We send her grapefruit at Christmas. I’m not saying people don’t have affairs, even very decent people, let us be so lucky as to fall into that category. But we cannot unbraid the story of another person’s life and take out all the parts that don’t suit our purposes and put forth only the ones that do. He was a great scientist, I will grant you that, and by all accounts a true charismatic, but he was also deeply unfaithful to two women and frankly that bothers me. It bothers me that the man you say you wanted to become was a lifelong philanderer.”

  “When did this start?” Marina asked.

  “We can take the life apart. We do it all the time.” The veins on Alan Saturn’s temples were pressing forward with their new influx of blood. “Picasso put his cigarettes out on his girlfriends and we don’t love the paintings any less for it. Wagner was a fascist and I can hum you every bar in the opening of Die Walküre.”

  “I don’t know Picasso and I don’t know Wagner!”

  “And you didn’t know Dr. Rapp!”

  The shouting caused Benoit to raise his eyes from the field guide he was studying. He pointed to the top of a tree and said in English, “Look!” But neither of the Drs. Saturn looked, nor did Marina, and of course Easter missed it completely.

  “I know his wife!” Nancy said, her voice high. “I know his mistress! If I didn’t know those two women I feel certain you’d be right. It would be just another bit of gossip from the annals of history, but that isn’t the case. You can’t separate it out when it’s someone you know. I can tell you he wasn’t a good man.”

  “He was the greatest man I ever knew.”

  “He left you with a tribe of Indians in Peru when you had a fever of a hundred and five!”

  “And they took me to Iquitos and eventually I got to Lima. It wasn’t as if he stretched me out next to a log in the jungle and walked away. We all understood the terms of the agreement going in. Anyone who slowed down the group would be cut from the group. Dr. Rapp was there to work and we were there to learn.”

  “You were nineteen years old and he was picking mushrooms!” Nancy Saturn had a wild look in her eyes, as if she were telling the story of what had happened to her child and not her husband. “His mistress must have been through medical school by then. At the very least you would think she could have stayed with you.”

  Alan Saturn would have stormed away at this point, the desire to leave her was plainly twitching in his muscles, working through his jaw, but they were on a boat on a river in the jungle. “The incident you are referring to happened a very long time ago.” His voice was steady and low. “I clearly made a mistake in confiding it to you.”

  “I’m your wife. It would have come out eventually.” Nancy Saturn was not in the least bit ready to break away. She saw she had a game advantage and did not blink.

  “You knew nothing about Annick and Dr. Rapp?” Alan said to Marina finally. There were still sparks of rage in his voice even when it was directed to her.

  “Not a clue,” Marina said. She would have liked to separate herself from the Saturns now, to find a place on the boat without roaches where she could sit down, because even though she could say that based on the information that had been presented Alan Saturn was wrong—Dr. Rapp had behaved badly, and Nancy Saturn was right, such matters were worthy of judgment—she found herself siding with Alan because there was much in his single-minded devotion to a mentor that sounded a familiar note. In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant.

  “Yes,” he said, trying to slow his breathing, perhaps another learned technique. “Well, a private matter.” Nancy opened her mouth but he put his hand gently on her forehead and used his thumb to rub in a clot of sunblock that was clinging to the roots of her hair. He cleared his throat. He was trying very hard to settle them both. “You see that river there?” He was speaking to Marina. He nodded towards a tributary. It would have been easily missed, the small opening folded into the jungle so discreetly. “You follow that river to the Hummocca tribe. It’s two or three hours from here. They are the closest tribe to the Lakashi and yet in all the times I’ve been here I’ve never seen them.” It was his one heroic attempt to change the subject. He took his hand from his wife’s head and there passed between them a tacit agreement. They were on a boat. They were not alone. They would find a way to stop this.

  “Dr. Swenson said that Easter was Hummocca,” Marina said, understanding that her part in the play was to pretend that nothing had happened.

  “No one really knows,” Nancy said, weighing her words out carefully. “But it’s the only logical explanation. The Jinta wouldn’t have left him.”

  “Did anyone try and take him back? See if they were missing a boy?” Marina looked over at Easter but he did not turn his head in the direction of the smaller river. Benoit was showing him a picture. He was steering with one hand.

  “Tribes are like countries,” Alan Saturn said. “They each have their own national characters. Tribes like the Jinta are essentially Canadian. Other tribes, like the Hummocca, are more North Korean. Because we have no direct contact with them we have very little information about what they do, and the information we do have keeps us away.”

  “Dr. Swenson has seen them,” Marina said. “She told me so when we were coming in.”

  “And that’s all she’s told you,” Alan said. “The story doesn’t go any farther than that one piece of information: she’s seen them and they frightened her. Just the idea of Annick being frightened of something is enough to keep me away.”

  “They’re cannibals,” Nancy said.

  “They were cannibals,” Alan said, “which is only to say a small part of the meat was eaten in rituals, not that they subsisted on a regular diet of human flesh, and there haven’t been any reports of it happening in the last fifty years.”

  They had passed the opening in the jungle now. Looking back over her shoulder Marina found it nowhere in evidence. Had they turned
the boat around she wasn’t sure that she could find it. “No reports in the last fifty years, but it doesn’t sound like anyone is going up there taking regular surveys about their habits.”

  “They’ve shot poisoned arrows at traders,” Nancy said. “Either they’re not very good shots and the arrows have landed wide of the boats, or they are very good shots and they mean it to be a warning. If Easter were at some point in his life a Hummocca, no one has plans to send him back.”

  When they arrived at the trading post it seemed less like Canada and more like Florida. A dozen or so tourists had come with their guide in an open boat from their eco-lodge to watch the Jinta children in their grass skirts as they twitched their nonexistent hips in time to the thundering rhythm of drums. The drums were played by middle-aged men, shirtless and thick, who were most likely the fathers. The fathers had run stripes of what looked to be red lipstick down their noses and across their cheeks and thrashed their heads from side to side like members of a garage band. The drummers were good but their children were better, their wrists encircled in tufts of grass. There were twenty of them or more ranging from very tiny to a few who were slightly bigger than Easter, and they stamped out a complicated pattern of footwork and then hopped in a large circle on one foot while sounding out the hue and cry of warriors. The tourists, enchanted, took pictures with their cell phones. A girl of ten or twelve with a red hibiscus tucked behind her ear stepped forward to dance a solo with a boa constrictor around her neck and so nicely did it hang and sway from her arms that one could not help but be reminded that a feather boa was made to imitate a snake. The mothers of the dancers quickly spread cloths on the ground and set out an array of small blow guns, tiny carved white herons, and string bracelets woven with red seeds. Having been given an opportunity to shop, the white women began bartering, wanting a bracelet and a necklace for the price of the bracelet alone. One of the women handed her husband the camera and then came and stood beside Marina. “Take my picture with this one,” she said. “She’s twice the size of the rest of them.”