Archangel

by Andrea Barrett

  There—that was why she admired him, why she’d come tonight. That was the kind of image she searched for in her own work and found, when she was lucky, with a sense of release that was almost physical. He was not a charlatan; he was a scientist who’d made real discoveries—he, as much as Marconi, had discovered the basic principles of the radio—and he’d drawn many to science through his lectures and his books. He might be old, and distinguished, and British, and a man; capable, as she had not been for years—had she ever really been?—of doing real science: but still they had more in common than just bolting from disagreeable ideas. How strange that what he seemed to care most about now was the possibility of communicating with the dead.

  THE LECTURE LIGHTENED something in her, or perhaps it was Sam’s presence beside her; his arm next to hers, his mind engaged, however briefly, with something that absorbed her. The distance between them had grown, she would have said a week earlier, because he’d developed his own interests, which he didn’t talk about much. On the train ride home, though, she considered how little she’d recently shared with him, so busy that she’d lost the habit of explaining her work. But as soon as she’d exposed him to Lodge he responded, which might mean that he’d be interested in the rest of the project; perhaps she could share other sections with him: perhaps the book would be wonderful! With a burst of enthusiasm, she began to draft her chapter on the ether.

  First a bit of history: a quick glimpse of Descartes and his whirling vortices, and then the newer conceptions answering the need for a subtle medium, universally diffused, that could propagate the undulations of light and electricity while also transmitting the pull of gravity. Waves in the ocean travel through water; light waves must travel through a similar interstellar ocean, which we can neither see nor feel nor weigh. This is the ether, nowhere apparent but everywhere implied. The ether, which, until quite recently, most scientists had assumed must exist. How then might we conceive of this omnipresent, impalpable, invisible something?

  She touched on Maxwell’s ingenious models and the various arrangements by which wheels and rubber bands, gears and pulleys and springs had been set to represent possible mechanisms. Neatly she fit after those pages the sketch she’d made of Lodge’s experiments with the whirling machine. Then on to the more recent and less mechanical conception of the ether as the ground from which both matter and energy arise. From Lodge’s lecture—she pushed aside the tangle of upsetting digressions and disturbing assumptions—she lifted the image of knots on a string, matter as coiled-up ether: matter may be, and likely is, a structure in the ether, but certainly ether is not a structure made of matter.

  And there the chapter crashed. She meant her tone to be judicious, sketching what had been believed when she was young, and what could fairly be believed now. To write something like: Experiments performed during the recent eclipse suggest that Einstein’s theories may be confirmed, in which case we may not need to postulate an ether to explain the transmission of light. However, spirited disagreement continues among scientists as to the meaning of these results, and it seems best, for now, to keep an open mind.

  But even as she wrote that, she knew she didn’t believe it herself. No one could find the elusive ether; all the experiments had failed. Lodge and those who disbelieved Einstein wrote as if the ether were real but mysteriously unfindable, the experiments that had failed to detect it somehow defective, and she’d meant to give equal space to that position but—how could she? It wasn’t just the lack of evidence; something was wrong with the logic too. How could the ether be composed of knots or vortices in the ether? Her brain stuttered, her mind balked. Her eyes burned and ached. The sentences crumbled as she wrote them, and when she thought again about Lodge’s lecture, the tangle she’d pushed aside then snared her. The ether was a home for ethereal beings, the medium by which soul spoke to soul; perhaps God lived there: perhaps it was God himself?

  She lay down and pressed a wet washcloth to her eyes. The ether was nothing and it was everything, it was whatever anyone wanted it to be. Writing about the ether was like trying to write about phlogiston. Although she’d explained more complicated models, and outlined concepts in which she believed less, never before had she tried to write something that taunted her with a sense of Michael hovering, just out of sight, in some gaseous form.

  THREE DAYS OF heavy rain trapped her inside. On the fourth day, a front blew through and cleared the air as completely as if a giant hand had sponged it dry. That night, very late, after everyone was asleep, Phoebe went outside and lay down on the flagstones bordering her mother’s garden. Late March, the ground alive despite the cold air. There were the stars, circling above. There were the stars. Brilliant, blazing, bright against blackness, as beautiful as when she’d first stared at them so many years ago. White, blue, yellow, red. Once she’d gotten serious about the work to which the stars had drawn her, she hardly ever looked at them. She studied their motions, not them—when did she look at the sky anymore? Months passed when night meant her yard, her street, a few blocks of Philadelphia: everywhere people, everywhere lights. Now the lights were out, there was no one around. With her back pressed against the stones, she smelled dirt and leaves and budding trees. Branches fringed her view of the sky, which was speckled everywhere—and wasn’t it remarkable, really, that she should see the stars at all? Inconceivably far away, emitting light that traveled and traveled—how? through what?—and fell upon her optic nerves to form a picture in her brain: stars! She felt herself falling up into them, a feeling she remembered from her childhood. The space between her and the stars was infinite or nothing at all, it was empty or it was completely filled, it was, it was, it was …

  The next afternoon she went looking for Sam, longing to talk about this. But Sam was gone; he was at a friend’s; they were working on a project for school. Disappointed, she sat down and wrote to Owen, describing her struggles and the two lectures she’d attended.

  Strangely, it was listening to Lodge that confused me. I’m not sure why, maybe that—how to say this? Lodge’s conception of the ether is one of those models that, like an orrery or a gigantic watch, sets a nearly infinite number of pieces of something into motion, each affecting the other, until the actions are explained. But I don’t think we can explain this mechanistically. Listening to him describe the survival of the personality after death as some element held in or made from the ether made me realize how completely attached he is to the ether as an actual physical thing.

  Interesting that she’d write that, but not a word about Michael. Not what flared through her mind at night: Lodge must be wrong, he has to be wrong. If he’s right, then Michael’s been within my reach this whole time and I could have been talking to him. I could be talking to him now. Not once had she even tried. She and Michael had held séances and spirit messages in such contempt that even to study the written accounts, never mind visiting a medium, would have felt like a betrayal.

  Yet here was Lodge, famous and influential, perhaps even—was it disloyal to think this?—a better scientist than Michael had been, testifying to his beliefs before huge crowds. Either he was a liar, which he didn’t seem to be; or she herself was the worst kind of fool. But Einstein’s theories had also generated a similar confusion, especially here, as she wrote to Owen:

  There’s a lot of pressure here—far more, I think, than in England—not to accept Einstein’s theory. People are so emotional—a prominent astronomer at Columbia started calling the theory “Bolshevism in science” as soon as the eclipse results were announced, and since then he’s written a slew of articles disputing the evidence. Another, in California, repeats him, but more shrilly. They have alternate explanations for the advance of the perihelion of Mercury. They object to the interpretation of the eclipse data (you know these arguments, the discarded observations, the large margins of error, etc.) and in the next breath claim that even if the light from the stars was shown to be bent, the cause may well be refraction by the sun’s corona, or a spurious displ
acement resulting from the chemistry of film development. They have plenty of supporters, working astronomers who place a premium on precise observations, and think the data from the expedition is nowhere near as solid as claimed.

  THE DAFFODILS PUSHED through the dirt; the trees budded and the forsythia bloomed; the tulips came and went as she struggled with her chapter. Over breakfast one morning, she read about a professor who’d been following Lodge from city to city, contradicting everything he said about the dead and demonstrating some of the fakery employed by mediums; apparently she wasn’t the only one disturbed by the mingling of physics and spiritualism. She read the article to Sam, who set aside his toast to listen.

  “That seems harsher than he deserves,” he said, surprising her. “I liked him, the way he seemed determined to think for himself.”

  But before she could encourage him to say more, her father passed through the room, humming disconsolately, and Sam rose and followed him, leaving Phoebe alone with her failures. Here her father was, getting older and struggling: she had to earn more money. She went back to work.

  Her mother’s obdurate peonies pushed through the dirt and unfolded their leathery leaves as Sam finished school for the year. The peonies budded, the buds bulged. Her mother, wrapped in a green apron, her hands sheathed in canvas gloves, disappeared into the garden, and her father retreated to the attic; Bach wafted down from the windows. She picked up her notebook and wrote: Sound is a wave that moves through the air, light is a wave in the ether … Then she crossed that out and wrote to Owen again, enclosing what she had so far. Owen didn’t write back, and didn’t write back, and then in late July he finally did, complaining about the shortages of food and coal and describing the weekend lectures he’d been giving to gatherings of miners and farmers. Only then did he comment on her draft.

  Most of what you have so far seems fine to me, coherent and logical, if too heavily weighted toward the history. Too much context, not enough of the actual theory? That might just be my own perspective. Phoebe, I really am not sure about this—but haven’t you fallen into that old trap of trying to make, from the symbols we use to reason about reality, pictures we can view in our minds? You know as well as I do that our ideas about space and time and molecules and matter aren’t anything like the “real” universe, although they parallel it in some way; we make models because they help us think, but what we’re really talking about here are mathematical statements that describe the relationships of phenomena. It’s a mistake to weed out all the mathematics, even when you are trying to explain a theory we already understand to be outmoded. I think you could do this more succinctly. And that you could come down more firmly on the side of what we know now—not what we used to think we knew.

  Since when did Owen talk to her like that? As if she were his student; as if she were a colleague’s undereducated, amateurish wife. She stared at her draft, unsure how to make it better. Once she’d been able to write, clearly and even powerfully. Once she’d gone to her desk each day with the unthinking expectation that she would pick up her pen and begin, and that from the very movement of pen across paper a train of thought would develop. Concepts would clarify themselves, sentences would flower into paragraphs; in this one small arena, she could do no wrong. She had lost Michael, she was at a loss with Sam, her parents were a mystery, she had no home of her own—yet on the page she could make an object that was shapely, and orderly, and on occasion helpful to others. She’d counted on this for years, without understanding what it would mean if it disappeared. As she’d counted on the sympathetic ear of a man she apparently no longer knew.

  “You’re so flushed,” her mother said, when the heat drove them outside to sit stickily on the chairs they’d pulled into the garden. “Are you feeling all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Phoebe told her. “Just tired. It’s been hard to sleep.”

  But what kept her from sleeping was not the heat. She tried to squelch the bitter thought that Owen did not, after all, regard her as his equal intellectually. For all her efforts to keep him from viewing her primarily as a woman—efforts that had cost a great deal in other ways—he still condescended to her.

  Quickly, almost mechanically, she wrote over the next few days a magazine article about the implications of the red-shifted spectra Vesto Slipher had observed for a handful of spiral nebulae. Then, with her papers drooping moistly over open books, she returned to her chapter, still unfinished, still not right. She tried this:

  If the ether exists as some sort of rigid jelly, then all of space is filled by it, everything in space is connected to everything else, a ripple here causes effects inconceivably far away—but space, however tied together, is all one thing, and time is something else. In Einstein’s vision, etherless, space and time are tied together into one four-dimensional continuum, impossible to visualize but perfectly clearly expressed mathematically. Time is variable in that vision; time expands and contracts depending on the position of the observer, and it seems possible that the past, the present, and the future might all exist at once, so that everything we’ve ever done and been might be laid out, accessible.

  Michael, she thought. The day they met, the moment their hands first touched, the day they were married, the moment when Sam was conceived. She scratched those lines out thoroughly.

  SEPTEMBER CAME AND Sam returned to school, still without Phoebe having completed what had once seemed like a manageable task. She gave up writing to Owen. She shut herself in her room, still far too warm, and she wrote and wrote, crossed out and wrote more. Then she fell sick for three weeks—the strain of working so hard, her worried mother said—and when she could rise from her bed she was more behind than ever. She’d lost weight, her hair was dry, and her periods had vanished; was it already time for that? Perhaps it was just from being sick. She made an effort to eat the meals with which her mother tempted her, and she put the chapter on the ether out of her mind. An acquaintance who taught astronomy at Bryn Mawr asked if she’d be willing to tutor three struggling students; she took them all. At the request of an elderly high school teacher in upstate New York, she also wrote an article detailing useful experiments, requiring little equipment, for youngsters.

  She found herself, as the new year came and went, in roughly the same place she’d been when Owen’s letter about the eclipse expeditions had arrived. Another year older, her hair more gray, still at her desk in her parents’ house—except that now she was past the time when she’d promised to send in her book, and Owen had drifted away, and Einstein was hugely famous everywhere. One by one, essays attempting to explain his theory to the non-mathematically trained reader had been published in Scientific American. Across the ocean, Nature devoted an entire issue to the explanation and implications of the principle of relativity. In the library, dutifully at first but then with some excitement, Phoebe read through those articles.

  She copied out phrases from the well-known physicists who examined different aspects of Einstein’s theory but in the end agreed that it was right: all except for Sir Oliver Lodge, who declared stoutly that while the theory might appeal by its beauty and weird ingenuity to mathematicians lacking a sense of physical reality, it so oversimplified the properties of matter as to risk impoverishing the rich fullness of our universe into a mental abstraction.

  Now that he and his psychic beliefs were safely in England, his recalcitrance seemed almost admirable. That steadfast insistence on common sense and the reality of a physical world in a physical ether: what did it cost him to maintain that position, now so unpopular? One afternoon, reading with her mother and Sam in front of the fire, she asked what Sam remembered of Lodge from the lecture last spring.

  “He remembers it very well,” her mother said. “Don’t you?”

  Sam nodded without looking up from the huge volume open on his lap.

  “What are you reading?” Phoebe asked.

  “A biology textbook,” he said, spreading his fingers over the pages. “My teacher loaned it to me, for an ex
tra project.” When her mother said, “Sam?” he added, “I wrote something about Lodge, for an English class.”

  “Can I see it?”

  He paused, looking down at his book, and then closed it on a pencil and rose. “If you’d like.” He left the room and returned with a few sheets of paper, covered in his meticulous small script.

  The essay, which he’d called “My Father, at a Distance,” started not with a memory of Michael but with a description of Sam’s evening at the theater in New York. Here were the rapt women, the box with the thread, the flow of Lodge’s talk as she too remembered it—but these things, for Sam, had been only a beginning. Like her, he’d gone to the library and investigated Lodge’s writings; but unlike her—she hadn’t been able to stand more than a few pages—he’d actually read Lodge’s book about his son, Raymond, who after being killed in the Great War had supposedly made efforts to communicate with his family.

  I didn’t expect to be swayed by it, Sam wrote. But I was, although perhaps not in the way Lodge meant. Sam described the letters Raymond had sent from the front, the photographs of him as a boy, the long transcriptions of Lodge’s sittings with mediums after Raymond’s death, the chapters of theory and exposition meant to help a reader interpret what Lodge presented as evidence for Raymond’s continued existence in another form. What this was, Sam argued, was evidence of a different sort: evidence of love. When Lodge wrote, People often feel a notable difficulty in believing in the reality of continued existence. Very likely it is difficult to believe or to realize existence in what is sometimes called “the next world”; but then, when we come to think of it, it is difficult to believe in existence in this world too; it is difficult to believe in existence at all, what he meant was: My existence makes no sense without my son.