by Rosalyn Eves
I was both.
chapter twenty-six
Monday, July 29, 1878
Pikes Peak, Colorado
Six hours after eclipse
I walk alongside the rocky shore of a glittering lake, a stone’s throw from a small cabin and a barn. Gold still washes the horizon behind me and glints in the folds of the lapping waves, but far above, the stars have begun to emerge for the second time that day.
Will is tucked into a bed inside the cabin, cared for by the same doctor who was summoned to see to Cleveland Abbe, the scientist sent down for altitude sickness. The rest of us will have to make do with lodgings in the barn, as the owner of the cabin was wholly unprepared for the tourist horde descending from on high after the eclipse.
Something crinkles in the pocket of my skirt, and I remember the Exponent pages I stashed there, ages ago, at Mrs. Jackson’s home. I pull the pages out and unfold them, squinting in the fading light to read. There’s news from home and from abroad, all old news. My eyes fall on an editorial by Lula Greene Richards, President Young’s great-niece and the first editor of the newspaper.
I urge readers to utterly repudiate the pernicious dogma that marriage and a practical life-work are incompatible.
I stop, find a seat on a nearby boulder, and read the line again.
Then a third time.
How have I missed this? For months, I have read every issue of the Exponent faithfully, looking for something that might tell me how to be a woman in my church. Something to tell me how to study the natural world without losing sight of God. Something to tell me how to make my own life without devaluing my mother’s. Something to reconcile the relentless pull between my heart and my mind.
This issue is older, dated from before I began my searching, but it has been here all along. I read the line again. Marriage and a practical life-work. Is it possible to have both? Most women with careers do not seem to have families—Miss Mitchell, Dr. Avery, Miss Culbertson. Or if they are married, like Mrs. Jackson and Mrs. Kendall, they don’t have children at home. Those few women I know with an avocation and a family follow work that might reasonably be seen as an extension of women’s domestic work: midwifery, millinery, baking. Even Dr. Romania Pratt and Dr. Ellis Shipp, who garnered so much attention when they went away to study medicine, are primarily healers.
But astronomy? Where is its domestic use?
I picture Samuel, smiling at me, teasing me, and my heart twists. I resigned myself to living alone, telling myself it was enough to have a shot at one dream.
Maybe I haven’t been dreaming big enough.
Just because I don’t know any woman living the kind of life I want doesn’t mean that life is impossible. I used to think that people were like comets, living their lives in fixed trajectories. But maybe that isn’t quite right. People can change their course, if they choose to.
I’m a person, not a comet—I don’t have to follow the orbit laid out for me.
If no path exists for the life I want, then I can make my own path.
Joy sings all the way through me. A cold wind whistles across the lake and I shiver, but I don’t go back in, not yet. I hug my arms around my torso and throw my head back, soaking in the emerging stars.
Science and faith. Work and marriage.
Not or.
And, I think, as though I’ve found a mystic talisman to unlock the universe: and, and, and.
* * *
* * *
By evening the next day, we are back in Denver. A night’s sleep at a lower elevation has helped Will considerably. Daniela led us down the trail back to Colorado Springs much more quickly than we ascended: the skies were clear and bright, and the storms that plagued us on our ascent had vanished.
We reach the Stevenses’ home just as Mr. and Mrs. Stevens are sitting down to dinner. They abandon their places and exclaim over us, particularly Will, whom Mrs. Stevens sends to bed with the promise of a hot tray as soon as it can be assembled.
Mr. Stevens claps Will on the shoulder as he passes. “I’m proud of you, Will.”
Will ducks his head, but his lips stretch into a grin.
“You must be famished,” Mrs. Stevens says to Alice and me. “Come along. I’ll have the maid set you both places.”
“How was the eclipse?” Mr. Stevens asks. “We had a marvelous view from down in the valley—everyone in the hotel turned out into the streets to see it. That lady astronomer is set to speak on it tonight at the Methodist church on Lawrence Street.”
I stop walking. “Miss Mitchell?”
“That’s it,” he agrees.
Even after our last uncomfortable interview, even with my stomach growling at me that I haven’t eaten in hours, I want to see her still. I want to know how the Vassar party fared at the eclipse, how their observations differed from ours.
Alice laughs. “Now look what you’ve done, Papa! We’ll never get Elizabeth to eat now.”
“Would you mind?” I ask, a bit tentatively. I don’t want to make the same mistakes again, of putting ideas before people.
“Of course not,” Alice says. “But have our driver take you there. It’ll be much faster.”
I have just time to change my dress into something neater and splash water on my face before the driver is ready. Alice presses a warm dinner roll into my hands and wishes me good luck.
“Do you want to come?” I ask.
“No,” she says, smiling. “I mean to eat a good dinner and then disappear into my studio to paint. My fingers itch just thinking of my canvases. But I hope you enjoy yourself.”
“Then good luck to us both!”
* * *
* * *
The church is crowded when I arrive, but I find a spot in a pew near the front. I nod at Miss Mitchell’s students, sitting together in the front row, and, to my surprise, Miss Culbertson not only returns my nod but also rises from her seat and approaches me.
“How was your view of the eclipse?” she asks.
“Breathtaking,” I say. “I climbed Pikes Peak and assisted the Langley brothers.”
Miss Culbertson’s eyes widen a little. “I’m impressed. With that determination, perhaps we’ll make an astronomer of you yet.”
“I hope so.”
She smiles a little and turns away, as if to return to her seat.
“Wait,” I say. When she looks back, I push out, all in a rush, “I’ve been thinking about what you asked me—why I choose to be Mormon, when it would be easier to adopt another faith.”
“Sheer cussedness?” Miss Culbertson raises her eyebrows at me, and I’m surprised into laughing.
“Maybe. My church isn’t a perfect church—is any?—but it’s mine. It’s where I find God. It’s a little like the eclipse. I could have chosen to view it anywhere around Denver, but I chose the Peak. My view didn’t perfectly match yours, but that’s all right. It was still worth the journey.”
“And only think how uninteresting our work would be if every journey, every view, was exactly the same,” Miss Culbertson says, grinning at me before returning to her seat.
Our work. My heart lifts.
Miss Mitchell’s lecture is as interesting and smart as she is, and I soak in the details—both the mundane ones, like how the sisters at the nearby Saint Joseph Hospital brought them tea as they waited for totality, and the scientific ones, how they hurried to record everything—the shape and color of the corona, the timing of the eclipse—and their fruitless sweeping of the sky for Vulcan.
She talks about Caroline Herschel, as great an astronomer as her more famous brother William, but who has been forgotten where her brother has been lauded, because she subordinated her own needs to her brother’s. “If what Miss Herschel did is an example, what she did not do is a warning.”
I think of my conversation with Alice, about our responsibilities to ou
rselves and to others, and then of Mama. I pray that she’s all right, even as I’m putting my own needs first for now.
Afterward, a large mob of people crowds around Miss Mitchell to comment, admire, and even pontificate about their own eclipse experience. She’s given a huge flower arrangement, shaped like an M and bordered with rose and gray, the colors of Vassar College.
I wait in my seat until they disperse, then approach the great astronomer.
“Miss Bertelsen!” Miss Mitchell beams at me, the discomfort of our last meeting forgotten in her triumph tonight. “Emma tells me you’ve been up Pikes Peak for the eclipse, helping the Langleys. Will you tell me about it?”
And so I do, with Miss Mitchell’s bright eyes fixed on me. Her attention is not that of a teacher hearing a lesson, but that of a colleague.
When I finish, she says, “When you’re ready for university, will you write me? I can put in a good word at our admissions office, and perhaps scare up some scholarship money. We need more girls in the West to get as good an education as our eastern girls.”
For a moment I’m afraid I might cry at her kindness. I blink back the tears pricking my eyes and draw a deep breath. “Thank you,” I say. “I was hoping to ask you a question, if you don’t mind.”
Miss Mitchell waits, smiling gently.
“I read that you were born to a Quaker family. And you are still religious?”
She nods. “Yes, though I do not practice the faith I was born into. I’m Unitarian these days. Maybe something else before I die! I think it is good to believe, better to ask questions.”
Something tight in me breaks open. I hoped my epiphany on the mountain was right, and her words confirm this. “So it is possible,” I say, “to be a scientist and a person of faith?”
She stares at me in astonishment. “Of course it is, child. Who has been telling you otherwise?”
Mama, I think. Not to mention all the newspapers that proclaim the triumph of science over religion. Mr. Draper’s book, arguing that science and religion are ultimately incompatible.
“It is not always easy,” Miss Mitchell says. “Sometimes we find questions that have no easy answers. Sometimes we find that we outgrow the faith we began with and need to try on a new faith. But let us have truth, even if the truth be the awful denial of the good God. Scripture tells us to try all things and hold fast to that which is good. I am hopeful that scientific investigation, pushed on and on, will reveal new ways in which God works, and bring to us deeper revelations of the wholly unknown.” In truth, I’m not sure if she said “wholly” or “holy,” but I’m not sure it matters.
And, I think again. Why have I believed for so long that my life had to be a series of “ors”? Why have I been afraid? If I believe in God the Father and God the Mother, they are not so small or so fragile that my questions can break them. They are not so narrow that I cannot find my own faith, my own way, within my religion. If they can encompass seeming paradoxes, like the sun and moon sharing the sky during an eclipse, they can encompass all of my contradictions and failings without being lessened.
And now I do begin to cry, because I have been afraid, because I have been small, because I thought myself trapped by the expectations of others when it has really been my own fears that have trapped me.
“Thank you,” I say, and wipe my eyes with the handkerchief Miss Mitchell holds out to me. I take down her address and say a polite goodbye to her students, wondering if someday I might be counted among them.
And having come so far, I’m ready now to go home.
* * *
* * *
I hug Alice tightly at the train station. “Thank you. For everything.”
She presses a kiss to my cheek. “Write to me.”
I promise faithfully to do so. I turn to Will and offer my hand. He shakes it, and grins at me. “I’m afraid your life will be much less exciting without us.”
“I’m afraid you’re right. But it’s time for me to go. I miss my family—and there are things I need to get settled. What about you? What do you plan to do, now that your father has lifted your confinement?”
Will rubs his chin. “I’ve been thinking about new adventures.”
“Not more trestle bridges!” Alice says.
Will laughs. “No. Or mountains. I don’t think either of those agree with me. Do you remember that fellow who came to find Mr. Edison in Rawlins, waving his pistol?”
“How could we forget?” Alice says. “Please don’t tell me you’re thinking of imitating that man. I don’t think our parents would approve of a career that involved waving guns at people.”
“No, not that. I was thinking about what the hotel manager told us, that Texas Jack used to perform in those Wild West shows and now guides people to hunt in the West. After the eclipse, I was thinking about how all these people came to Denver to see something amazing, how they climbed a mountain just for a few minutes of glory.”
Alice wrinkles her nose at him. “You don’t exactly look like a mountain man, if you’re thinking of being the next Buffalo Bill.”
“Why don’t you let me tell you what I am thinking? You’ve guessed wrong twice now.”
Alice subsides, with only her pressed lips showing her irritation.
“I’d like to travel, to find places in the world that make people feel that same kind of wonder as the eclipse, and then guide people to those places. They can even stay at Grandpa’s hotel, if our routes pass this way. There’s so much wonder in the world, and I don’t want to miss any of it. You can come paint the most spectacular scenes,” he says to Alice.
“I’ll bet it will be brilliant,” I say, watching as a porter lifts my battered trunk into the luggage car. “Maybe you can take me to Egypt for another total eclipse in four years.”
“Naturally, it will be brilliant,” Will agrees. “And I’d be honored.”
“Mama will definitely like travel better than the trestle bridge,” Alice says.
“I should hope so. I’ve been thinking about what she always tells you about responsibility, how we have to balance what others want from us with what we want for ourselves. I think maybe risk is like this too. Sometimes we have to take risks, for ourselves and others. But the problem with the trestle was that it was a risk I took that served no one but myself. If I take risks in the future, I want them to be for more than just me.”
The conductor blows the whistle, and I check my bag one last time for my ticket—I’ve had to borrow money again but promised, again, to pay it back—then turn to Alice.
“Send me word of your art school,” I say.
“I will. Here’s to dreaming!”
“And adventure,” I say, and head toward the train.
Will calls after me, “If your train gets robbed again, stay away from the elk!” His laughter follows me into the train, and I’m still smiling as we pull away from the station.
chapter twenty-seven
Wednesday, July 31, 1878
Outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming
Ammon picks me up from the train station in Cheyenne and drives me back to see Rebekka. There are dark circles under his eyes that suggest he is not sleeping enough, but he’s in a cheerful mood and peppers me with questions about Denver and the eclipse.
Rebekka waits on the front doorstep when we arrive, gently bouncing Ida in her arms. As soon as Ammon helps me down from the wagon, Rebekka thrusts her daughter into Ammon’s arms and folds me in an enormous hug.
She pulls back to look at me but doesn’t release me. Like Ammon, she has dark smudges under her eyes, but her gaze is bright. “Well?”
“You were right,” I say, hugging her again. “It was wonderful.”
“I’m always right,” Rebekka says, and draws me into her home.
That night, I rock Ida in the rocking chair and tell Rebekka and Ammon about the eclipse. Ida see
ms to have gained at least a pound and an inch in length since I saw her last, and she rubs her tiny face sleepily into my chest. I stroke a finger along her downy cheek.
As we talk, I watch Rebekka and Ammon, how they smile at each other as if no one else is in the room, how Ammon teases Rebekka and she teases him in turn and their laughter seems to light up the small sitting room. And, I think. I want this too.
I can’t stay long at Rebekka’s, since I need to get back to Mama, but I try to soak in this moment. Already my heart is tugging me onward, toward Monroe, toward home—toward Samuel.
* * *
* * *
The road from Monroe up to our house has not changed in the six weeks I’ve been away. The sun still beats down on my head; dust still clouds around my feet. It’s been a long road back from Cheyenne, first by train, and then a series of rides from Salt Lake City to home.
I reach the mill first and hesitate, but I don’t like to interrupt Far and Hyrum at their work. The door of the house is wide when I arrive, propped open by a rock to let the breeze in. Voices tangle in the air. Distant shouting and splashing echoes down the canyon—probably my brothers. There’s a tickling that starts in my feet, hums up my bones, fills my heart and throat so full it prickles my eyes too.
I step inside.
Emily chops vegetables at the table and quarrels with Mary, who is sitting beside Rachel and helping her form her letters with a bit of paper and pencil. Rachel looks rosy and healthy, and her high child’s voice pierces me with relief. I don’t see Mama or baby Albert—maybe they’re both in the bedroom.
I stand on the threshold and say nothing for a moment, just absorb the sounds and sights of home.
