"I thought money made the world go round," I said to Gloria.
She grunted in a noncommittal way.
"I thought the feud was about wills."
"Ah! Your family feud!"
"Or incest," I said. "Or at least adultery."
"Yes?" she said. "And?"
"It was about a broken engagement."
Engagements are ridiculous. Animals don't get engaged. They court. The word engagement went around and around in my head. We didn't get engaged in college. We hung out or hooked up or moved in together. I wondered what Martha's college years had been like. Or even high school. And then I began to think about high school, that weird island separated from the rest of civilization.
"Okay, Gloria," I said. "Let's look at high school in Darwinian terms for a moment. An isolated geographical area. Once connected to the mainland, but now cut off. You see what I'm getting at? An island. A rugged terrain, few resources. Well, actually, the school had a swimming pool, but I don't mean that. I mean the real food and water of the adolescent, I mean attention and popularity and rebellion and achievement. There's a struggle, right? Every organism for itself. Gradually, over four years, a nanosecond in geological time, but an eternity in teenage time, the organisms appear with slight variations—pants a little baggier, hair a little shorter. Natural selection, high school division, sees this deviation as helpful. It promotes the organism's success in its environment, and so this deviation is encouraged and passed on from grade to grade, and soon more and more exaggerated versions of it spring up—"
"We had to wear uniforms in high school."
"So did we, but you know what I mean."
"I teach high school," Gloria said. "I generally try to view those years as a time of youthful enthusiasm."
"That's what my mother used to say. She's a teacher, too."
"Well, there you are." Gloria smiled at me. "They do outgrow all that, you know."
I tried to think of something I had outgrown since high school, something I could attribute to simple youthful enthusiasm, and it was true that almost all of high school seemed best attributed to youthful enthusiasm. I thought particularly of a teacher I'd had an affair with, a small, potbellied, balding teacher. I didn't really like him. I wasn't attracted to him. It was just a fun, or at least a funnish, thing to do, like driving all night to Boston, then turning around and coming home without getting out of the car. Maybe that was what my mother's engagement to Martha's father had been like. But I had not carried on an extended bitter feud with my English teacher. I couldn't even remember his name.
I lay in bed across from Gloria. She had propped up her pillow by folding a large orange life preserver beneath it. The beam of the bedside light, wan and narrow, groped toward her open book.
I said, "It's condescending to say everyone outgrows everything."
"Yes, you're right. Let me emend my statement: everyone dies. Darwinian enough for you, honey?"
Everybody dies. I had even seen someone die. I had seen the man drown in the swimming pool. Martha and I sat on the side of a grassy hill in our twin bikinis and watched a man drown without even realizing it. I had thought about that day many times. I often wondered if Martha remembered it, too. But she never spoke of it, and the one time I tried to bring it up, a few years later, she told me I was morbid.
"I saw someone die," I said to Gloria. "Martha and I did. It didn't seem real."
I used to reconstruct that day. I would try to determine the exact moment the swimming man became a drowning man. I wrote a story about it for English class when I was in high school. It was the October after the fire. Martha and her family had moved back to New York. In the story, I described Martha's stubby fingers, how they had fascinated me, how they had blotted out the existence of death.
And once again, I remembered that moment when I saw myself as others must have seen me, when I was stunned.
I sent the story to Martha. I had not spoken to her in a couple of weeks. I would not speak to her again for ten years, until I saw her with her sign at the airport on the island of Baltra.
I sent Martha that three-page story typed on my mother's typewriter because it was partly about her, because it was something we'd done, or seen, together, because I thought it would interest her. But perhaps it had not interested her. She probably thought it was morbid. Or just not very good.
I sat on my bunk, and the force of my own embarrassment was sickening. All was revealed—the sin I had committed, the stupid, pipsqueak sin that had extinguished a friendship. I had sent Martha a story about the man drowning at the Barlow Country Club, a story about her fingers, a story about her. She had read the story and never forgiven me.
Maybe she had not liked being observed. Maybe she thought I was poaching, co-opting her life. The story of the drowned man and the stubby fingers had disgusted Martha, angered her. Martha thought I had betrayed her, betrayed a confidence. Or she was simply insulted because I noticed, and remembered, and reported on her short fat fingers.
Martha's fingers were still a little stubby.
But, really, Martha, I thought, it wasn't just your story. It was mine too.
That whole night and the next morning, I argued mentally with Martha:
It was just a story. Couldn't she tell the difference between a
character in a story and a real person?
It was all true. I didn't make anything up, so how could she
object to my describing what really happened?
It was a sign of loyalty that I had written about something
that happened to us so long ago, and a sign of loyalty that I
had sent it to her to see.
It had absolutely nothing to do with her. It was just an Eng-
lish assignment. Why make such a federal case out of it?
I sent it to her, so obviously I had nothing to hide.
Why should I have told her anything, anyway? She never
told me about our parents' being engaged.
I continued this dialogue the next morning. I walked in my thinking circles thinking about Martha and my mother and her father and her dwarf fingers. And then there she was before me, sitting on a deck chair with a notebook open on her lap. I sat down on the chair next to her.
"Today we'll see daisies that have evolved into trees," she said. She closed the notebook. I tried not to stare at her stumpy fingers. She pulled a guidebook from under the chair. She pointed to a picture of a spiky bush crowned by stunted daisies.
Your fingers aren't that bad, I thought. Why are you so sensitive about them?
"See?" she was saying. "Daisy trees. A forest of them. They won't be in bloom, though."
"Are you sure about the engagement?"
"Aunt Anna told me in the hospital, right before she died. She wouldn't tell me why they split up, though."
"I wonder why she didn't tell me."
"I don't know why she did tell me. She was probably having nicotine withdrawal. And she really did give me those pearls, after all. She was amazing, your aunt Anna."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
Martha looked up from her book. She was chewing gum. She shrugged.
"I don't know. I never saw you. I just did tell you."
And then at last we boarded the pangas for the island of Floreana.
"Don't leave Grandpa here," Dot said when Martha and Gloria began chatting about the Ritters, the Wittmers, the baroness, and the corpses.
Jack put his arm around Dot and kissed her head, just the way my mother used to kiss mine. Martha looked at them curiously, and I thought, first, that Martha did not know about the deceased William Cornwall coming on the trip, and, second, that William Cornwall really had come on the trip. Grandpa was a stowaway in an urn. Take nothing but pictures. Leave nothing but Grandpa.
"They ought to be ashamed of themselves," Mrs. Tommaso said.
"Who?" I said. Did she mean the Cornwalls? Would she tell Martha, who might then be obligated to confiscate Mr. Cornwall?
> "The human race."
"Oh, them," Gloria said.
Craig and Cindy were holding hands, and I wondered if they had been inspired and touched by the story of the Ritters. Perhaps every couple, when they get married and decide to have children, think they are somehow starting a new line. A new line. Like dresses with shorter skirts for the spring. Pantsuits this fall, sleeker, more feminine, in the new synthetics! Lineage is a little like fashion. A closet full of DNA. Natural selection has to go out unexpectedly tonight! The weather is terrible, a goddamn flood. She'll ruin her shoes! What will she wear? Paws? Claws? No, no, those fabulous sunflower-yellow web feet!
We spent the morning at a beach that was made of green sand. Martha told us about the olivine crystals in the volcanic tuff. She held out a handful of the dark, sparkling sand, and I looked at it through the wrong end of my binoculars. I could see the dainty crystals, smooth and egg-shaped, resting on Martha's outstretched palm.
Darwin sailed to the Galapagos to find the answer to the mystery of mysteries. I had sailed to the Galapagos, I had come all this way, and what had I found?
One: Martha hated me because of something in that English story. That explanation seemed more and more plausible, if only because of the timing involved. I sent it to her. I never heard from her again. Q.E.D.
Two: My mother was once engaged to her own cousin. He probably wanted to go sailing with her, so she had to break up with him. A splitting event. Then she met my father. He said, "I don't sail. I row. But only in college." And she had fallen gratefully into his arms. Their passion flourished, landlocked. I felt, I had always felt, that my parents belonged together in some very profound way. I wondered if that belief in their fitness for each other made my marriage to Michael more precarious. My parents seemed destined for each other. I had never felt destined for Michael. I did not feel destined, period. But then, if all of creation was the fallout from various happy accidents, perhaps I didn't have to be destined, only opportunistic. I tried to think of Jack as my new niche.
We sat on the beach and watched Cindy play with the hermit crabs she found on the mangrove roots. I wanted to ask Martha more about the engagement. How old were they? How had they met? I tried to imagine them making love, or even kissing, their identical blue eyes staring like incestuous mirrors.
I wondered again if Craig could have been one of the wandering nocturnal blankets, or the man talking to the woman outside my window a few days before. I listened carefully to his mild voice as he asked Jack if he was satisfied with his hiking shoes. And what about Jack? Perhaps if I knocked on Jack's cabin door later, he would say, "Is that you?" like the anonymous blankets, and I would recognize the voice. How could I get him to say, "But where? When? Oh, if only..." like the man outside the cabin window?
Silly thing to think about as one sits on a green beach viewing the biological mysteries. Silly to think about assignations or English papers from long ago or broken engagements. I felt vaguely guilty, petty. And yet we were on Floreana, isle of the guilty, isle of the petty, an island even a naturephobe could love, a soap opera of an island, a great seething volcanic cauldron of human vanity, a land of no opportunity, and even that squandered. Floreana, the New Jersey of the Galapagos. Pirates and fierce red-haired hermits, a penal colony, and, best of all: The Nietzschean Dentist and His Lame Love Slave! The Austrian Whip-Cracking Faux Baroness—Self-Proclaimed Galapagos Empress!—and Her Three Abject Lovers! Jacob Astor's Yacht! Nudists! Norwegians!
"If flies and horses and humans all evolved separately," said Jack's sister, Liza, "along different branches of the universal tree of life, how did we all get eyes?"
Our cameras and binoculars hung like huge beads from our scarlet necks.
"Eyes are useful," Martha said after a while.
Frau Wittmer received us in the dining room of her post office-hotel. She stood in a cotton housedress beneath maps of Germany and a print of the cathedral at Cologne. Dark wooden beams, lace curtains, and flowered tablecloths—we could have been in the Black Forest with Hansel and Gretel. We were in a fable, a German fable transported to a Pacific island. The white-haired, pink-cheeked suspected murderess with sparkling blue eyes shook hands and posed for photographs. Even Mrs. Cornwall recognized that here was a matriarch of unusual stature. Over the years, Margret Wittmer's name had come up in connection with seven murders. She outlived the superman dentist by many decades. Some people think she killed him, for he died after eating a portion of that potted chicken she sent around each month. I don't blame her for that one, though. Ritter was a vegetarian, and he had some scientific training. He ought to have known that chicken is not a vegetable. And when he fed it to his livestock, the stuff had killed them. Most of us, even without that training in dentistry, would at this point throw the potted chicken away. But perhaps because Herr Doktor Ritter was more than a dentist, because he was a philosopher, he boiled the spoiled potted meat. Then he ate it. Then he died. I'm sorry, I don't think you can lay that one at the feet of old Margret.
When I saw Margret Wittmer, so pink and white and robust, I wanted only to marvel at her as I had at the frigate birds with their inflated red balloon necks, at all the flora and fauna, at the volcanoes on which they all lived. As Gloria raised her camera to take a picture of me with Frau Wittmer, the old lady quickly pulled her glasses off, then stared blankly in the direction of the camera lens and smiled. She seemed to me in that instant so utterly human and so absurdly vain. It was unnerving.
Behind her house, or, properly, her hotel, there was a pen in which she raised Galapagos tortoises. They sunned themselves, hardly distinguishable from the dirt of the little corral. We walked past them, down the dusty road that ran by the few other houses, in which lived various Wittmer descendants. Chickens scratched at the dust. Martha pointed out some trees. I heard someone behind me grumbling that this excursion had nothing to do with natural history.
Jack, who was walking quietly beside me, said, "Quite the contrary."
Jack's face was golden in the equatorial sun. I walked beside this friendly man with beautiful eyes, and I thought, Perhaps my same old self, which I've accidentally brought along to this new world, will get to work in a brand-new way, will blossom and flower, like a thick-trunked tree of daisies.
"It may be argued [that] representative species [are] chiefly found where [there are] barriers," Darwin wrote in an entry in one of his notebooks, "and what are barriers but [an] interruption of communication?"
Gloria pointed this passage out to me after lunch. She said she felt as if there had been an interruption of communication. I thought she meant communication with me, and I agreed, saying perhaps she should listen more carefully when I told her my interesting theories about high school and such, but it turned out she meant that she felt far, far away, just as I did, just as Jack did, just as we all did.
"Look! Here's a definition of species for you," she said, pointing to a passage in the huge red paperback volume of Darwin's notebooks. She was looking through it as we stretched out on our bunks for a short siesta.
"Definition of species: one that remains at large with constant characters, together with other beings of very near structure—Hence species may be good ones and differ scarcely in any external character:—For instance two wrens forced to haunt two islands one with one kind of herbage and one with other, might change organization of stomach and hence remain distinct."
"But how near is 'very near structure'?" I said. "At what point do we say 'Aha! Not near enough'?"
"You'll have to find that one yourself," Gloria said. She tossed the book onto my bed.
"I think the organization of my stomach has changed," I said. I felt vaguely seasick and I took a nap. When I woke up, Gloria was gone. A gloomy peace suffused the cabin. I lay in the stillness listening to the boat's creaks and nautical groans. And then I heard the voices, the same voices. They were rendezvousing in the same place, criminals returned to the scene of their crime.
"Can we ever make this work?" said
the man softly.
"Of course we will," said the woman. "Soon."
"You can't imagine what it's like," he said. "Every day. Having to pretend..."
"I know it's hard."
"Thank you," he said. "Thank you."
It was Jack. It was Martha. I heard them clearly this time. I recognized their voices. I tried to determine if I was dreaming. I often have lifelike banal dreams about someone calling and canceling an appointment or complaining about an unpaid bill, which I have a difficult time identifying as dreams in the morning. But this dream hardly qualified as ordinary. Perhaps the changed organization of my stomach had produced a changed organization of my dreams. That was a more welcome explanation than Jack and Martha making assignations outside my window.
We landed on a small beach on another part of Floreana late in the afternoon and walked a few hundred yards on a path toward the interior. I watched the vegetation change as we crossed from the coastal zone to the arid zone. The change was ridiculously abrupt, as if the plants knew where they belonged, which I suppose they did, in a way.
The Evolution of Jane Page 15
