The Vanished Child

by Sarah Smith

  “Look out! Can’t you see where you’re going?” No, you— She mentally stuffed the words unsaid back into her box of rebellions.

  “Why, if it isn’t little Perdita!”

  “Good evening, Miss Blackstone,” Perdita sighed.

  A huge, warm, powder-smelling shape flashed a lorgnette at her. “Are you going to play the piano for us? I did so enjoy your little recital at Mrs. Beach’s. She says you are quite promising—such praise from a woman of her eminence!”

  To get anyone’s attention with a piano tonight, Perdita would have had to hit them with it.

  “Miss Emma, have you seen Harry?”

  “Why, child, he is all over.” Miss Blackstone lowered her voice. “I understand he is about to become a young man with very great expectations—?”

  “Oh, Miss Emma, I know nothing about that.” Sometimes it paid to be seventeen.

  “Oh, of course not, my dear. A girl should never think of such things. But what is wrong with your uncle? Your uncle Charlie, my dear, came rushing in as if he were bringing a bucket to a fire. I hope he is considering his health; he is just back from Europe, and you know one can get such terrible diseases abroad. I do so look forward to hearing everything that he learned on his Tour—will he host a little collazione at the Children’s Clinic, perhaps a photographic slide lecture?”

  “The buffet is in the dining room,” Perdita said a little acidly, but Miss Emma Blackstone just cooed and sailed off toward the rear of the house. Perdita hoped everyone who wanted éclairs had already got one. Miss Blackstone hunted éclairs as Teddy Roosevelt shot buffalo, by the hundreds and thousands.

  There was a huge roar over the heads of the crowd: Harry’s voice. “Where’s my girl?”

  “Oh, Harry!”

  He caught her up in a big bear hug. “Pet,” he said, “Pet, this is the happiest night of my life. The thing is I love you. I want to dance. Dance with me.”

  She sheltered herself in his arms, molding her movements to his shuffle. Harry laughed. “I dance like a football player, don’t I, Pet?” He did; but it was endearing, like everything about big, blond, athletic Harry. They swayed among the crowded dancers.

  “From tonight I am king of England, tsar of all the Russias, sultan of Turkey,” he murmured in her ear. “Rich as Jay Gould, almost, and I deserve it. Just between you and me, Pet, I’m going to head up the Knight companies better than anyone else in the world.”

  She hugged him. Up in the library Uncle Charlie and Uncle Gilbert were mourning the boy they really wanted. She kept her arms around him. Harry, how can I protect you? Only by telling you you are loved.

  Suddenly, around them people had stopped dancing; shivers rippled through the crowd, stirrings, all in one direction. Under her palms, Harry’s hard muscled back tensed like an animal’s in a storm. The band stopped playing, not all at once but dying away in a fray of instruments. Someone pushed a champagne glass into her hand.

  “It is nearly midnight,” Uncle Gilbert’s ready voice fluted above the noise. He sounded so shaky, so sad. “And I would like to propose a toast to Harry—Harry Boulding—who is twenty-one at midnight. And it is my expectation, my hope—” He paused for a very long time and Perdita held her breath. Uncle Charlie said something in an undertone from the same place on the steps. Gilbert finished, like a little child rattling off the end of something only half memorized, “That the company my father founded will, in the fullness of time, be in good hands under Harry.”

  That was all there was to the speech. For a moment no one said or did anything, as if they were still trying to work out exactly what Gilbert had said. Then one by one, among Harry’s friends, there was a ragged beginning of cheers for him. Finally everybody started cheering, as if they felt it was the thing to do. “Get up, Harry! Take a bow!” yelled Harry’s friend Joe, who could always be counted on to make a racket. “Hip, hip, hooray! Drink up, everybody!” Perdita touched her lips to the chill, sour wine.

  Harry touched her arm. “Do you love me?” Harry asked under his breath.

  “Oh, Harry, of course.”

  “Nobody cares about me but you. He doesn’t care. You know that.”

  He pushed away from her and elbowed his way up the stairs. “Thank you, Uncle Gilbert. That was short but sweet. Now, you guys, quiet down a moment. Joseph, don’t drink it all yet, you pig. I have an announcement that is going to outrun and outhit everything. Pet, come up here.” Someone pushed her forward. She felt the railing of the stairs underneath her hand. “Stand here. I want everybody here to see you. See what a girl I’ve got.” He put his fingers to his lips and blew a loud whistle. “Ladies and gentlemen! Cut it out for a minute! You too, Efnie. I've got something to say.”

  The crowd noise quieted to a low buzzing. Perdita, standing on the stairs, could feel their eyes on her.

  “You all know that I came here ten years ago. The first person I saw here was this lovely little girl. Well, now I'm older, and this lovely little girl is older—though you wouldn’t think it to look at her.”

  “Baby-stealer, Harry!” someone shouted.

  “You said it, Turk, I’d better steal her before someone else does. So I’m saying tonight, right here and now, to my lovely girl Perdita: Pet, will you marry me?”

  There was a chorus of real cheering, or it was only her blood singing in her ears. You are my true child. She sat right down on the stairs in surprise and put her hands to her mouth. Oh, Harry. Harry her husband, she his wife, and their children; and Uncle Gilbert would truly care for Harry at last.

  “Oh Harry,” she said laughing, “thank you!”

  Some of the people below burst out laughing, and she supposed it was funny; but she knew they were laughing with her. “What a kid!” Harry breathed into her ear as he kissed her. She felt a little link slip over her finger as Harry held her hand up: engagement ring, she thought, astonished because she was going to be married. It was as if the whole world had changed. She was engaged and she was going to be married to Harry, and he would be her husband. She said the words silently, the round heavy words of married love, and they rolled in her mouth as unfamiliar as rocks or rings.

  “You love me,” Harry said. “You love me best of all.”

  A madman in Boston

  Chemistry is hypothesis, followed by seeing and touching and measurement. The work of observation is inspiring; if one is good at picking a subject, one will see things that no human being has seen before. But at its worst it is drudgery, and for Reisden it was drudgery for all the winter and spring of 1906.

  Reisden’s own work was in muscle contraction, one of the most exciting and most frustrating areas of the field. For a hundred years the motion of muscles had been “understood”— nerves move muscles by stimulating them with small electrical charges. By using Einthoven’s string galvanometer, one could actually observe an electrical charge passing through the nerves and causing contractions in the muscle. But it had only become clear within the past few years that the electrical charge was actually some extremely complex form of electrochemical reaction.

  What was its nature? Neural messages did not act like electricity in wires. They were probably a series of discrete chemical reactions, moving much more slowly than electricity in wires or water—electricity in the nervous system of a frog was slower than a racing car. Moreover, at least in frogs, the neuromuscular system was affected by changes in temperature to a degree far greater than could be easily explained by known electrochemical reactions. A frog outside on a frosty day was so inefficient that a few hops would exhaust it for an hour.

  Did the cold change the frogs’ usual reactions, or merely slow them down? Reisden hypothesized it only slowed them down. Were they slow enough to make observation of the recovery reaction easier? If so, by mincing the nerves at different stages of the recovery from stimulation, one would get a stop-motion view of the chemical changes that took place during the recovery process. In the winter and spring of 1906, that was what Reisden was doing, studying th
e formation and breakdown of several cofactor compounds in the nerves of dissected frogs, their temperatures lowered to precise measurements.

  He was not an enthusiastic vivisectionist, though he had known researchers who were; it hurt him to kill frogs. When he was well, he accepted doing it; when he found himself getting unbalanced, he usually found himself hating it. That spring, almost constantly, he hated it.

  He didn’t know whether it was the difficulty of keeping the temperatures right, or having turned down the Paris job, which he did just after New Year’s. The weather was bad that season. The snow settled in hard over Lausanne, building up in the streets, the slushy grey of soot and horse dung. Reisden’s series of refrigeration experiments finally finished in March, and, though he had more than enough material to talk about, it seemed to him as though he were missing some essential point.

  He avoided seeing Louis at all. Louis was going to spend the whole summer over in America, mostly at the Connecticut Agricultural Station but partly with a man in New York, and Reisden had promised to help him with translating the lectures he would deliver there.

  Looking for a method, a new angle, means letting one’s imagination loose. Reisden roamed restlessly, spending two uncomfortable days in Paris with Berthet and talking with colleagues and old friends, long lost track of, at a conference in Giessen. But to travel, to visit, had unfortunate meaning of its own: Berthet, Reisden realized, was sounding him again about coming to Paris. He felt like Lazarus risen from the grave, not having meant to do it and finding it frightening. He felt pointless and dangerous to everyone.

  Being with so many people turned his nerve ends raw. The conversation had holes in which, very politely of course, no one asked him about either his past or his future. They talked chemistry. It seemed a temporizing, and he felt he had nothing intelligent to say.

  And sometimes, over the weeks and months, he thought of the Knights; and then, unusual for such a curious man, he realized he was trying not to think of them.