I’ve had time, these last months, to consider all the mistakes I made my first year here. One was certainly my failure to cultivate these people more fully when they first visited us. Because Dr. Kane’s ship was frozen in on this side of the Sound, he was in more immediate contact with them. Always they aided him; and might have aided us had I pressed them more last winter. Perhaps we might have escaped with their help last spring. Instead we saw them only twice; our great loss. Now it seems clear that something one of my crew said or did—I won’t speculate as to whom—gave these people the impression we were evil and to be avoided. Only after I was alone did they approach again, giving me the chance to adapt myself to their habits. The white man can only survive comfortably here by living as the Esquimaux do. Almost all the things we brought with us are useless. Esquimaux clothes, hunting techniques, eating habits are what make life possible. I imagine that Dr. Kane also discovered this—but he never lived among them, as I’ve done for six months now.
APRIL 30, 1857. Upernavik, at last! The Danish traders welcomed me and gave me news of Dr. Kane—how tragic, this unexpected death after escaping the arctic! Also they tell me my men arrived here safely and are thought to be home. The walrus are streaming north and my Esquimaux must follow them; they’re uncomfortable here, they’ve had no previous contact with the natives of this settlement and their customs are very different. I’ve given each a parting gift: a knife or a packet of needles, the last of my flannel shirts cut into pocket squares for the children.
Two remain behind as the sledges head north again. Annie and her son, Tom, have agreed to accompany me home, despite the hardship of leaving their family behind. They’re excellent representatives of their race, intelligent and agreeable; fine ambassadors to the civilized world. With their help I can convey to others the interest and wonders of their culture. And together we may teach other travelers how best to prepare for future journeys of discovery in the arctic.
HUNCHED OVER HIS work table, Erasmus read those columns with his stomach lurching and heaving. Trump this, he could almost hear Zeke saying. You collected bones and twigs, and then lost them; you and your friend. I’ve brought back people. Not skulls, not brains in a jar: living, breathing people.
He read through the columns again. Which parts of Zeke’s account were true, and which were not? He’d glimpsed Zeke’s notebook a few times, when Zeke was pointing out things to Lavinia; the pages were clean, no more tattered than when Erasmus had last seen the notebook in the box. No grease stains, watermarks, drops of blood or food or filth. Perhaps he’d written it all in the spring, during his journey to Upernavik. Perhaps he’d written it all on the ship that carried him home. Or perhaps only the entries regarding his journey on foot were faked, and the others were true.
He longed to ask Annie and Tom about their time with Zeke. A few times, when Zeke was off giving interviews or had gone home to sleep, Erasmus had approached the Esquimaux. Each time Lavinia had hovered. “You mustn’t tire them,” she’d said. Not leaving him alone with them for a single minute; equally unwilling to spend a minute alone with him herself.
From the Repository he watched strangers moving in his house. His eyes were sore, his head ached, something hurt at the base of his ribs; he drank brandy, hoping for comfort and warmth, but it only made him dizzy. He hid for the next few days, unable to eat or sleep. He could not remember ever feeling so sick, he was sure he had a fever. A figure appeared on the flagstones, crossed the garden, opened the Repository door: Zeke. He came ostensibly to ask if Erasmus felt all right but then said, in a calm dry voice, that Erasmus was upsetting his sister. “It makes her unhappy to have you around,” he said. “Especially when you behave like this.”
Erasmus touched a glass of water to his parched lips. “I can’t talk,” he said. “I’m sick.”
When Zeke left, he slipped from his chair and lay under the table. It was true that Lavinia shrank from his gaze; he’d come upon her and Zeke embracing in the solarium, holding hands in the garden, pressed against each other’s shoulders. Always she looked happy until, catching sight of him, her lips would tighten and the color rise in her cheeks. Zeke, he thought, must have told her stories. Stories so ugly that she no longer trusted her own brother and could not enjoy her new happiness in his presence.
He wrapped his head in pillowcases wrung out in cold water—where had he gotten this fever? Finally, when he felt better, he dressed in clean clothes and joined the others for dinner. Candles, flowers, Alexandra quiet at one end of the table and Lavinia glowing at the other; Copernicus and Zeke between them. He sat, after a murmured apology, and confronted a platter of sauteed calf liver: the food he hated most in the world, as Lavinia had always known. Not once had she ever served it to him. The slabs gleamed at him, sending out an evil smell. Why wouldn’t Zeke stay at his parents’ house, where he belonged? His Esquimaux were still upstairs; he rested his arm on Lavinia’s chair; his papers were scattered everywhere. He ate the liver greedily, once more asking after Erasmus’s health.
Erasmus pushed away from the table, trembling and queasy. When he stood, the surface of the table dipped and swam, shimmered and danced, the glasses waltzing with the spoons. Chasing the meteorite that had been the instrument of Zeke’s salvation, he’d dropped through a hole in the ice just the size of this table. In the moment before he lost consciousness he’d opened his eyes and seen murres racing and darting around him, swift as fish, amazingly graceful. They were clumsy in the air but flew like angels through the water, and suddenly he’d seen why they were built as they were: the water was their natural home, as with walruses or whales. Now he saw that he’d misjudged Zeke in the same way. This house was the home Zeke had always craved; he’d slipped into it the minute Erasmus lost his place.
“Lavinia,” Erasmus said. She glanced up at him, her eyes glazed with that translucent film. He cleared his throat and steadied his walking sticks beneath him. All he’d ever wanted for her was that she have the chance to live with the person she loved, as he had not. And if he couldn’t bear the way she became around Zeke . . . “Would you excuse me?” he said.
THE FOLLOWING WEEK he made arrangements to move out of the Repository until Lavinia and Zeke were married and settled into a home of their own. “I know it’s my house,” he told Copernicus, who tried to talk him out of his decision. “I know it’s a bad idea, but I’m angry all the time and I can’t stand to be around Zeke like this, and I’m sick and I don’t want to fight with Lavinia . . .”
“One meal,” Copernicus said gently. “She ordered it because Zeke likes liver. So do I, for that matter.”
Erasmus held out the folds of cloth hanging from his belt. “It’s weeks,” he said. “I didn’t want to worry you. But I can’t keep anything down.”
Alexandra was equally bewildered. “I have to move,” she said. “Of course I do, Lavinia doesn’t need me anymore. But you don’t have to.”
“I can’t think,” he said. “I can’t work, I can’t sleep, I can’t eat.” She frowned but helped him pack a few things. Erasmus moved slowly, deliberately, hoping that Lavinia might walk in and interrupt him. Might rest her hand on his and say, “Where are you going? Why don’t you stay?”
She hid in her room, saying nothing. He hesitated near her door, wanting to knock, afraid to knock. Then, almost as an afterthought, he stopped at the room farther down the hall to take his leave of Zeke’s Esquimaux. He’d seen little of them; Zeke prepared their meals, which they ate here. Zeke took them for walks each day, and at night, when he returned to his parents’ house, he locked them in their room and asked Copernicus—Copernicus, Erasmus thought, not me—to check on them.
Their room looked like the inside of a summer tent; skins were hung on the walls and spread on the floor. Annie was crouched in front of the window with Tom in her lap, a plate of boiled chicken, barely touched, on the floor beside her. “Where is Tseke?” she asked. “When does he return?”
“With his parents,” Erasmus said. Though he kn
ew that was just for the afternoon. “He’ll be back soon.” He had no idea if Annie understood Zeke’s relationship to Lavinia, or the oddness of his own position.
“I’m going away for a while,” he said. What difference could this make to her? “I wanted to say good-bye to you and your son.” Just as he was thinking he could never know anything about her, a dusty tan moth emerged from the fur near her knee.
“Good-bye,” she echoed. She caught the moth with an absentminded gesture. As he watched she opened a crack in her fist, peered at the fluttering creature, and then released it. Exactly as he would have done. Why shouldn’t they talk?
“Why did you come here?” he asked. “Did Zeke force you?”
“It was necessary,” she explained. Her eyes followed the moth’s path: window, ceiling, window, closet, window, window, window. “He says, ‘I am a kind of angekok—did I not bring you the iron, the bears, the narwhals? Did not all the children stay well while I am with you? But I need you to come home with me and meet my people, so they will understand where I have been.’ ”
Her voice, repeating this, mimicked the pitch and rhythm of Zeke’s in an uncanny way. The moth bounced against a row of books: pfft, pfft, pfft. Then soared up to the ceiling and into the window again. “He must bring me home to meet his people or my tribe will suffer. He said your ship had a spirit also, and was angry at being left behind in the ice. I must come here to where the ship is born, so the spirit does not punish my people. He says it is the same as with the spirit of the saviksue he disturbed.”
Her English was remarkable, Erasmus thought. Zeke had taught her so much. “Did you believe that?” he asked.
As she shrugged, Tom slipped off her lap and hid beneath the caribou skin that had earlier sheltered the moth. She might have answered the question Erasmus didn’t ask: Why did you all want Zeke to leave? They’d kept Zeke alive because the angekok ordered it, and their efforts had been rewarded. But he couldn’t stay with them once winter lifted; he had no sense of his place and could only bring them ill luck. Her tribe was one great person, each of them a limb, an organ, a bone. Onto the hand her family formed, Zeke had come like an extra finger. They’d welcomed him, but he’d had no understanding of the way they were joined together. He saw himself as a singular being, a delusion they’d found laughable and terrifying all at once. When he strutted around, it was as if one of the fingers of that hand had torn itself loose, risen up, and tottered over the snow.
She might have tried to explain all this, but instead she shrugged again, eloquent shoulders in Alexandra’s ill-fitting dress. “I understood he wouldn’t leave without me; he said he couldn’t. This is why my family let me go.”
ERASMUS RETREATED TO Linnaeus’s house. He might have rented pleasant rooms, might even have bought a house—but this was temporary, he thought. He needed to catch his breath and longed for some familial comfort while he did so. Still, he wondered if he’d made the right choice. His books and clothes barely fit into the small guest room allotted to him; the only maid frowned when she came for his chamberpot in the morning and disturbed the papers he left on the tiny desk. He missed Alexandra, who’d returned to Browning’s house the same day he’d left home. He missed Copernicus; he missed especially the long days during which the three of them had worked together. Yet somehow everyone seemed to think he had brought this on himself.
He sat in the small, hot room, watching the flies hurl themselves at the window. Day after day slipping by, and now this, the worst of all. Zeke and Lavinia were being married this afternoon, at his own house. A small ceremony, only Zeke’s parents, his sisters and their families; Erasmus’s brothers and their families. Everyone but him. Lavinia had sent a note:
Why are you acting like this? It’s your house still, and I won’t keep you from it. I would like you to be with me on my wedding day. But not if you come in a spirit of bitterness. If Zeke can forgive you, if I can forgive you—why can’t you accept our new lives together?
To Linnaeus he’d said, “What choice do I have?” Linnaeus, looking uneasily at the heap of books piled near Erasmus’s bed, had said, “You must do what you think best.”
Erasmus had sent a silver tea set and instructed Linnaeus to tell everyone his fever had returned. Now, as if his untruth had brought it on, he had a terrible headache. The maid brought him a pot of coffee, too strong, and forgot the sugar bowl. When she returned with the bowl but no spoon, he said, “Kate—why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
Her broad face, covered with freckles, reminded Erasmus of Ned Kynd; a hint of Ireland was still in her voice although she’d been here since she was a girl. Hard-working, intelligent, usually good-humored; only sullen when she was alone with him. He said, “You know.”
“Didn’t I bring exactly what you asked for?” But she knew what she’d done, she’d done it on purpose. “Is there anything else?”
“Just go,” he said.
After scooping sugar into his cup with a twist of paper he settled down to write a letter to Ned. Such a confusion, he couldn’t imagine where to begin. He started with this room—the desk, the bed, the flies—and wrote out from there. About all that had happened since Zeke’s return home, the two Esquimaux camped in his house while he was sequestered here; about the wedding he couldn’t attend. About the newspaper article, which, although it hadn’t criticized him directly, had turned the whole city against him. He folded up the three long pages of newsprint he was including, and then confessed his theft of Dr. Boerhaave’s journal and the related glimpse of Zeke’s black book. Six pages, eight pages. His hand grew tired.
After a pause he wrote to Ned about the party the United Toxophilites had thrown for Zeke. Part welcome-home party, part bachelor party; all the Toxies in full regalia.
You may remember those suits. From the day Mr. Tagliabeau signed you on; all those men in green coats and white pants, with their bows and arrows. They’re an archery club. I used to belong.
He told Ned about the speech Zeke had given, regretting that the Esquimaux bow and arrows he’d obtained for the club on Boothia had been lost through no fault of his own. And the drinking, the wild toasts, the dancing women and the arrows presented to Zeke with jokes about his aim on his wedding night. He wrote about the work he and Alexandra and Copernicus had done on his book before they were stalled. Then he found himself longing to write about the lonely nights here in this room.
The walls were tissue thin, and on Sunday nights—always, but only, Sunday nights—he could hear Linnaeus and Lucy making love. Those squeals, those little groans. He couldn’t imagine Lucy with her hair down, her mouth unpursed, the things she must do to make his brother make those sounds—they wanted another child, he knew. Perhaps that was the reason for their clocklike regularity. As for the way their noises made him think of Zeke and Lavinia, finally together . . . He kept himself from writing about any of this, describing instead his strange meeting with William Godfrey. Eighteen pages, twenty-one. At the end he wrote:
This is how everyone sees me now; as if I’m just like him.
IN BROWNING’S KITCHEN, the night after the wedding, Alexandra brooded as she cooked. Dismissed, she thought, as she lifted biscuits from the oven. She and Lavinia had never been equals, not really. What they’d done was wait together, and wait and wait and wait; and although this had bound them as survivors of a disaster were bound, so that they’d always have a connection, still she’d been Lavinia’s paid companion, never exactly a chosen friend. As Lavinia had made quite clear. The instant Zeke came back, Lavinia had turned from her. “You’ve been so good for me,” she’d said, when Alexandra proposed returning to Browning’s house. “But of course you’ll want to get back to your own work, now that you’ve managed to establish yourself.”
Their time together was over; she’d learned a great deal and must be grateful for that. And she was determined not to lose her relationship with Erasmus. Working together, she’d felt them building what she’d always imagined a
friendship might be. They’d shared thoughts, work, reading, interests; they confided in each other but also respected each other’s privacy. She missed him every day.
On the tray before her she arranged the food she’d prepared for the Percy sisters: boiled chicken in jelly, the hot biscuits, butter, plum jam, lemonade. Browning had taken on the care of the two elderly women who lived across the street, and somehow they’d become Alexandra’s responsibility as well. They weren’t crazy, not exactly, but they were ancient and isolated and for the last six months had been convinced that people were trying to poison them. They’d take food only from Browning’s hands, and eat it only in his presence. Morning and evening he brought food that had once been cooked by Harriet but which now Alexandra prepared. Then he sat patiently with them while they ate.
The texture of his life, Alexandra thought. Which was becoming the texture of hers. A crowd of people needing help, among which he spread himself and his wife and his sisters willingly but too thinly. Already she was tired of the way Browning assumed he could direct her.
Yet no matter how many hours she spent preparing meals, or helping out with the children or the family projects, there had to be some fragments of time left to her. If she slept less, perhaps. If she rose very early, even before Browning rose to prepare his classes; if she could steal an hour or two for her own work before her family began their demands: then she could feel as if she still had a life of her own. She could do what was asked of her with good grace, if she could have this time alone. The thing was not to give in completely.
Voyage of the Narwhal Page 29
