Archangel

by Andrea Barrett

For some, the meeting itself was a kind of grief. In the midst of the questions, Sir Oliver Lodge stood up abruptly and rushed out without a word. Later, he told a reporter he’d left to catch a train, but some of the younger men have been a bit cruel, the old man running from the new theory and so forth. Not easy at that age, I imagine, to find that the world has just become a different place.

  I have forgotten to thank you for your report on the Washington meeting, and to say that I read your chapter on “The Evolution of the Stars” with real interest. I hope the book is coming along wonderfully, and that you and Sam are both well.

  An actual report, finally, from an actual witness: how pleasing, to glimpse a scrap of reality! The articles in the New York Times, based on cables sent from London, had been as muddled as those Owen described. Men of science more or less agog—oh, indeed. Lights all askew in the heavens. The articles trumpeted the impossibility of understanding the theory while at the same time suggesting that it had changed the world.

  Phoebe rose from her desk, went downstairs, and stepped outside to look at the sky. Nine o’clock and freezing cold, the moon two days past new, the stars giving no sign that they were not as they’d once seemed. The sound of her father’s viola waved down from the top of the house, bits of Bach easing through the old glass in the attic windows, spreading from her mother’s garden, where in June the peonies flourished as if fertilized by the sound, through the tiny backyard to the neighbors on all sides. Always her father played at night, retreating from what to him was a world in which everything—business, politics, music, art—grew steadily worse. Yet the house hadn’t crumbled around them; the house, in which first he and then Phoebe had grown up, and in which she was now raising her son, Sam, looked the same. So too—she checked again—did the stars above. Where you lived and what you knew determined what you expected to see. Once the moon was a smooth glowing orb, and then it had mountains and seas. Once Jupiter wandered alone, and then he had moons; once orbits were round, and the stars stayed still in space. In earlier books, she’d traced those changing perceptions. Now she was trying to write about the universe beyond the solar system. Who first thought those glowing specks were other suns, like ours? Or that some were island universes, far beyond the Milky Way?

  Back in the dining room, her mother sat at one end of the table, doing something with a heap of cloth, while Sam, at the other end, frowned over his homework. Phoebe stopped in the doorway, next to the long crack that might have appeared to a stranger as part of the molding’s design, but in fact had been made when Sam, in a fit of temper after they’d first moved here, had hurled his suitcase at the wood. “I had a letter today from London,” she told her mother. “Michael’s old student, Owen—”

  “Do these look the same length to you?” her mother asked, holding up two white strips.

  “She’s been cutting out sleeves, for shirts to send overseas,” Sam explained without raising his head. He turned the pages of a small notebook and with his pencil added a tiny number to a column.

  “Homework?” Phoebe asked her son. Look up, she thought. Talk to me.

  “Sort of,” he said.

  If she moved his way, she knew, he’d smile and close the notebook, say good night, and a minute later disappear into his room. Door closed behind him, books closed on his shelves, body—he’d suddenly sprouted six inches, and his hair had darkened to Michael’s shade—concealed beneath long sleeves and long pants. Instead of reaching for her secretive boy she hung back and watched her mother shuffle paper patterns, pins and chalk, and a formidable pair of scissors.

  “Russia?” she asked. “Owen said his sister is headed there with another relief committee.”

  “Arkangelsk,” her mother said. “Way north, near Finland. There’s been a lot of fighting there. Odette’s doing the collars and Leila’s working on the cuffs. We’ll start piecing them together next week. What else did he have to say?”

  Briefly Phoebe explained the meeting in London and the results Owen had described. Sam’s pencil ticked down the numbers while her mother’s scissors yawned and then snapped through the middle of a sentence. “That sounds important,” her mother said.

  “It is,” Phoebe said. “I need to understand it better, for a chapter in the new book. In fact—”

  “Of course,” her mother said, snipping away. “Don’t let us interrupt you.”

  BACK AT HER desk, back in her room, centered in the house like a plum in a dumpling. Her father above and her mother and Sam below—Sam, who for a couple of years after Michael’s death had clung so closely that sometimes, if she stopped or turned quickly, she’d trip over him. He liked to balance on a footstool, one hand on her thigh and the other on the frame of the large painting hanging in their tiny rented house in Washington.

  “Tell me,” he’d demand, until she pointed out the figures that her great-uncle, Copernicus Wells, had painted on Pike’s Peak during the eclipse of 1878. Then she’d name the instruments—telescope, spectroscope; your father had fancier versions of those—and finally note the flaring corona and the coincidence of her being born, far away, on that exact day. Copernicus had given her father the painting, which her father had given to her—

  “Just after you were born,” she’d add, pushing away the memory of Michael gazing at his new son, eyes wide beneath his reddish gold brows. “When you’re grown up, I’ll give it to you.”

  Adrift in Washington then, with no idea how to continue her life, she’d imagined that she and Sam would always be close and that when he was older she’d tell him how that painting, along with her love for mathematics, had helped steer her toward astronomy. How her father had bought her a telescope when she was twelve, while her mother, who came from a Quaker family with a long tradition of learned women, had encouraged her studies. Surely Sam would want to know what she’d done before he was born. She’d imagined telling him about her time at Cornell, where she’d been drawn not to the patient collection of data, nor to speculations about the nature of the universe, but instead to the long, complicated, orderly calculations of celestial mechanics. An observant professor had helped her find a job as a computer at the nautical almanac office in Washington, where she’d briefly imagined that she might be promoted. Instead, she’d met Michael Cornelius, an astronomer with the Smithsonian.

  “We fell in love,” she’d told Sam beneath the painting. A phrase that usefully hid everything, from the feel of Michael’s leg against her own to the smell of his hair warmed by the bedside candle. “We got married, and—your father always appreciated the work I did—I kept my job until you were born. I helped him with his papers.”

  Sam, not quite four when Michael died, claimed to remember only his father’s instruments and the scarred wooden desk where he’d bent over maps of the sky. What different images they’d kept from those few years! The bed she and Michael had shared, their passionate absorption in astronomy, and their companionable hours of work were invisible to Sam, who remembered only what he saw and heard, and what had to do with him. In the dimly lit room where they worked after supper, Sam would sit on Phoebe’s chair, his back snugged against her side, tightly held by her left arm—but it was Michael, concentrating fiercely, whom he faced and whose smile lit Sam’s eyes. So too had he faced the student visiting from England, a young man with an odd gait who delighted in clowning and liked chanting nursery rhymes to Sam. Tweedledum and Tweedledee: that was Owen, acting out bits from Through the Looking-Glass while she calculated results from the data he and Michael had gathered.

  Owen was at Cambridge now, a rising young astrophysicist with everything before him. Whereas she … at least he was polite about her work. Books and articles for the interested ignorant—Astronomy for the Young, Eclipses for Everyone—mingling what she hoped were sufficient facts with artful descriptions and homely analogies designed to take the place of the mathematics she loved but knew her readers couldn’t understand. The Milky Way is shaped like a biscuit. A nebula is like a cloud on the verge of condensing
into rain. Donkey work, requiring a certain gift but not, despite what Owen was polite enough to pretend, a valuable one. She pushed herself to try something new each time. For her latest, The Universe Around Us, she’d promised her publisher a clear and interesting version of the complicated material often mauled in popular accounts. Until recently, when she’d begun this difficult chapter on gravitation and the ether of space, she’d thought it was going well.

  She turned back to Owen’s letter, struck again by that image of Sir Oliver Lodge bolting from the meeting. Only a few days earlier she’d seen an article about him in the newspaper. He was on a ship from London to New York, about to begin a big lecture tour. Some of the talks were already sold out, which wasn’t surprising—unusually, for such an eminent scientist, Lodge liked to write for those who had no scientific training, and she’d sometimes turned to his books for help. Remembering that a list of lecture dates had appeared in the article, Phoebe rummaged through the stack by the fireplace until she found the right paper.

  ON THE EVENING of Lodge’s scheduled talk, a crowd snaked out between the tall arches of the Academy of Music, and she learned that every seat was sold. Reluctantly, she bought a standing-room ticket and stepped into the moving mass, carried up the stairs and then up again to one of the galleries on the second tier, where she came to rest behind two women pressed against a fluted column.

  “You can fit in here,” the first woman said, moving her purse to make room.

  “It’s Phoebe, isn’t it?” said the second. Her nostrils faced more out than down, giving her a slightly pig-like air. “Odette,” she continued, tapping her chunky throat. “Jenkins—your mother’s friend?”

  “Of course,” Phoebe murmured. One of the scores of well-meaning women who served with her mother on committees to educate the children of China or feed the starving people caught in Russia’s civil war. Too many to keep straight. They’d cheered her decision to go to college, been delighted when she got her job in Washington, tried to conceal their disappointment when she married young and promptly had Sam.

  “There he is!” the first woman said.

  Phoebe craned her head but could see the famous old physicist only in snippets. One long leg, one big hand; he was enormously tall. A sliver of his forehead gleamed in the light of the chandelier before a woman’s hat eclipsed it. He would speak, he said—he had a fine voice—on “The Reality of the Unseen.”

  She missed his introduction. His words floated up through the horseshoe-shaped tiers, interrupted when the crowd murmured or shifted in their seats, obliterated entirely when Odette whispered to her friend. There were things known to be real, Lodge said, but impossible to see: atoms, for example. Molecules. She strained to hear, hoping he’d describe the invisible but omnipresent ether. Instead she caught something about the vast distances between the stars and the contrast between that and the minuteness of the atomic world: also unseen, but also real. After a lost chunk that must have contained a vital transition, she heard next a sentence about the reality of mental events, such as thoughts and feelings, which were also invisible. She peered through the crack between the two women’s necks.

  “Likewise,” Lodge said just then, “the human personality survives death in a form we cannot see, but which makes communication after death possible.”

  She pulled her head back and jammed her hands into her coat pockets. What kind of science was this? She knew he was interested in psychical research—he was as famous for this, in circles she avoided completely, as he was for his work on the ether and electromagnetic waves—but she’d assumed his lecture would be about physics. Instead, he was explaining how great discoveries in science have reversed the evidence of the senses: the earth is not flat, but round, and it is not static, but whirls through space at inconceivable speeds. “So too will we come to reverse the evidence of our senses with regard to death,” she heard. “Psychic research, the youngest science, deals, like astronomy, with phenomena that cannot be examined in the laboratory. Still, theories can be tested and refined over time. Science will eventually prove the existence, all around us, of former humans; they are not far from us; we are all one family still. To the mothers of boys lost in the war, I would say that they are only separated from us by a veil of sense.”

  In front of her, both women sighed, and Phoebe remembered that Odette’s son had gone overseas to drive an ambulance. Had he returned? All around her, the audience—mostly women, she now realized—listened raptly, while Odette reached back to touch Phoebe’s arm, as if they had something in common.

  “We should not exalt the senses,” Lodge continued. Phoebe drew her arm away. “They have been developed through necessity for the physical survival of the fittest. But if we did not dedicate ourselves so completely to the daily work of keeping our bodies alive, what organs of spiritual comprehension might we not develop? The space that separates you”—he stretched one hand toward the audience—“from me”—he pressed that hand to his chest—“is not empty. It is the purveyor of light, of electricity, of magnetism; and it may well contain our immortal souls, which persist after matter has disintegrated.”

  She stepped back before she understood that she was going to, ignored Odette’s startled face, and pushed her way through the bodies and down the stairs. Wrong, so wrong. She hated when people spoke of communication with the dead, and it was worse when a scientist did so. Rappings and knockings, scribblings on slates, ectoplasm and all of that—ancient history, half a century old, most already proven fraudulent and the rest fit only for parlor games but still strangely persistent. When those superstitions had surfaced again, during the thrilling years when the discoveries of X-rays and radium, radio waves and electrons had made almost anything seem possible, she and Michael had simply ignored them, instead reading eagerly about light as waves, light as photons, energy possessing mass. The space between them, Michael said, was filled with energy, the ground of life itself.

  She couldn’t imagine what he’d have made of the ease by which, once the war began to swallow the young, those left behind succumbed to the resuscitated parlor tricks. The turbaned women cracking their joints in code or slipping their feet from specially stiffened shoes to write with their toes on slates—by then, left behind herself, she knew exactly how despicable they were. In 1909, not long after Owen returned to England, Michael had welcomed into the observatory a little boy who turned out to have measles. The boy recovered, but Michael’s fever soared higher and higher until the morning he closed his eyes and sighed and—stopped, just stopped. In that instant she’d known she would never talk with him again.

  The lobby stank of face powder; Phoebe pushed through the doors and into the street, where the snow flickered in the electric lights and a cat streaked by with something squirming in its clamped jaws. Michael had wanted to show off the wonders of the universe and now—she was walking so fast that her cheeks were hot and a woman in a short skirt stared at her—now, because a boy had given him measles, because she had a boy of her own to raise (the church bells chimed the hour; he’d be doing his homework), because, despite working all the time, she couldn’t save enough to buy a house of her own, she was, at the age of forty-one, living with her elderly parents, and still, despite having published three books and innumerable magazine articles, orbiting so far from the center of the scientific world that she must turn to others for explanations that would, when included in her book, lend it the air of authority she lacked herself. She must go to a lecture where, instead of learning what she needed, she was forced again to confront the unalterable fact of Michael’s death.

  I WAS ASTONISHED, she wrote to Owen a few days later.

  Not to mention disappointed. How does a man like him—a man who has spent his entire life thinking and writing about physics—a man who idolizes Clerk Maxwell and Helmholtz and the rest—end up like this? One thing to bolt from your meeting; Einstein’s theories are so abstract that I sometimes wonder if anyone really understands them. But to refuse to accept them on the
basis of insufficient proof, while at the same time contending that the survival of human personality has been proved: how does this make sense? The crowd was enormous, though, and seemed to glide right over the holes in his logic.

  What, she thought as she took a new sheet of paper, would Owen have made of that talk? He’d been fresh out of university when he came to Washington, a slim boy with a high forehead, a clubfoot, and a calm faith in the triumph of true science. Not once had he acted surprised by her mathematical skills or questioned her ability to help him and Michael. He’d been Michael’s protégé, not hers, but she’d come to think of him as a friend and an equal and still considered him her one stalwart colleague, although they hadn’t seen each other since before Michael’s death, and she could no longer picture his face. Always—almost always—he responded to her letters. Always, courteously, he asked about her son, although she knew he envisioned not this Sam but the eager, open toddler of their days in Washington. Sam’s hair had been blond then, wisping pale curls she could never keep parted; no more like the springy auburn mat he now hid behind than her own sandy dullness was like the shiny chestnut waves Michael had loved. But then Owen himself might be halfway bald, no longer thin; perhaps with a stoop, still with a limp: wouldn’t he have told her if he’d had his foot repaired? Maybe not. Ideas connected them, mathematical symbols and diagrams, a disembodied thread of thought divorced from their daily lives. When she wrote him, she shaped her letters around pleasant anecdotes.

  There’d been no point describing the details of those first harsh years after Michael’s death, when she’d tried and failed to regain her old job and then found that she and Sam couldn’t survive on the piecework calculations sent over by the Ephemeris staff. Skipping over the daily humiliations and petty miseries, she wrote lightly about the newspaper editor seated next to her at a dinner party—in her letter to Owen, a casual encounter; in fact, her rescuer—who, after learning about her training, had asked her to explain what caused the spring and neap tides. Pleased by her quick demonstration with an apple, an almond, and two bits of bread, he’d suggested she try writing about astronomy for the general public. From the column in his local paper (no examples of which she sent to Owen), she’d moved on to articles for the Electrical Experimenter and McClure’s, then to her Scientific American pieces (which she did send), and her first books.