Archangel

by Andrea Barrett

  From Lodge’s longing for his son had come, Sam argued, an entire theory of etheric transmission, which, if it wasn’t true—he himself believed it was not—was still a marvelous example of how science was influenced by feeling. About the connection between that feeling and the construction and testing of any scientific hypothesis. Lodge had suggested in his lecture that Einstein’s theory had been tested but not completely proven by the eclipse experiments. His book suggested that his experiments after Raymond’s death offered a similar level of proof for the theory of survival of personality. Phoebe slowed down and read each word.

  My father died when I was four; I miss him all the time. For years I was sure he was up in the air somewhere, among the stars he studied. I listened for him every night; I thought that from someplace deep in space he would try to contact me. When we moved from the house where I was born, I was terrified that if he sent a message it wouldn’t reach me. Later, I convinced myself that he could find me anywhere, at any distance, and that the fault was mine; if I couldn’t hear him, it was because I didn’t know how to listen. If I stretched myself, broadened myself, I’d be like a telescope turned onto a patch of sky that before had seemed blank; suddenly stars would be visible, nothingness would turn into knowledge. Across time and space, my father would reach out to me.

  Here was Michael at last: she could see his face as clearly as when they’d first kissed on the riverbank, under the starry sky.

  Eventually, I had to give up on this idea, but as I listened to Lodge’s lecture I fell back into it, and for a few moments, I wanted so badly to believe him that I did. I understood the ether of space to be exactly as Lodge described it, a universal medium that transmits not only electromagnetic forces but also the thoughts and longings of the dead. Only when I looked around at the audience and saw them all believing the same thing did I realize what was happening.

  I don’t understand the physics behind Einstein’s theory, and I don’t believe in the existence of a spirit world, but my introduction to Lodge’s work changed the way I think. I don’t know, and I don’t believe there is sufficient evidence yet to prove, whether the ether is real the way the atmosphere is real, or the way the equator is real. Whether Einstein’s theory has been proven, or Lodge’s theory of survival of the personality after death, or neither or both. I don’t know whether my father exists in some ethereal form or only in my heart. What I do know is that the questions we ask about the world and the experiments we design to answer them are connected to our feelings.

  Where had Sam learned to write like that? Upstairs, her father’s viola sang, dismantling troubles Phoebe knew nothing about. Across from her, Sam and her mother nestled back in their chairs, each reading with such concentration that when she finished Sam’s essay, neither noticed for a moment. Then her mother looked up.

  “It’s good,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

  “Lovely,” Phoebe agreed. Her mother had already read it. Down the stairs, through the empty rooms, triplets rippled in sets of four: the prelude to the sixth Bach cello suite, transcribed for viola, which her father had been playing while she and Sam and her mother read, each of them deep in their own thoughts but sharing a room, the light from the lamps, the sense of piecing together a sequence of thoughts. Then—not a rift, but a discontinuity. How does a person end up like this? For much of her life she’d been listening, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, to her father play those suites. Until just that moment, with the triplets running steadily up and down, she would have told herself that the space between her and family wasn’t empty at all but held light and music, feelings and thoughts, and a bond that could be stretched without breaking.

  The Island

  (1873)

  The train trip took the whole day. Oswego to Albany and then the length of Massachusetts, orchards and mountains and rivers and fields, cities appearing then disappearing while the sky darkened steadily until, near Boston and the coast, the rain began. By nine o’clock, when Henrietta Atkins stepped down at New Bedford, it was pouring. Her skirt was spotted with mud before she was halfway down the block; her hair dripped over her shoulders; the two bags packed with notebooks, drawing pencils, boots, clothes, and the tiny stipend meant to cover her expenses for the next seven weeks sagged alarmingly.

  This was on a Friday night in July of 1873, the low clouds trapping a smell—weedy, salty, slightly medicinal—that Henrietta, who had never been near the shore, thought might be the sea. She headed away from the station, searching for the hotel that the organizers of the natural history course had recommended to those coming from far away. Excelsior? Excalibur? She’d lost the letter with the details—but there at the end of the block was a gray building, four stories tall, marked with a giant E. She climbed the steps, set down her bags, and pushed back some wet strands of hair. Inside, she imagined, might be other students signed up for the course: girls who, like her, had just graduated from Normal School and were about to start teaching, older women who’d worked at academies for a while, men who taught at colleges and might give her advice. A shame to meet her new companions so bedraggled.

  The hall was empty, but she followed the sound of voices into a sitting room, where two men stood before a fire. One, talking intently, was stout and young and cradled his round stomach with one hand. The other she recognized as the famous professor. In person he looked older, and less robust, than the portraits in the newspapers. When he caught her staring, she set down her bags again.

  “If you have books in there,” he said, interrupting his companion to gesture her way, “I hope you wrapped them in oilcloth.”

  “Of course,” she said, mortified. She’d imagined meeting him in a classroom, where she could hide among a mass of other students. In a classroom, not here. At Oswego she’d studied his zoology textbook and read his work on glacial action, while long before that her mother, in response to a public plea for specimens, had proudly contributed to his study by sending him fish from Keuka Lake. His letter of thanks, matted and framed—a form letter but, as her mother always pointed out, personally addressed and signed—still adorned their dining room wall.

  She offered her name, adding, “I’m one of your students, I think. I’m so looking forward to starting your course tomorrow.”

  “Tuesday!” the professor said genially. “We don’t start until Tuesday.”

  “If then,” the younger man added. “The buildings are barely halfway done and I don’t see how we can finish in time. You may have to delay the course.” He flicked at the newspaper lying on the table. “There’s an article in here about it, so embarrassing …”

  “We will start Tuesday!” the professor repeated. “We absolutely must.” He turned back to Henrietta. “But why did you come so early?”

  She’d confused the dates, Henrietta learned then. Mocking, by her own stupidity, the award her teachers had given her at graduation, which would pay for this course; mocking her proud mother’s twenty-first birthday gift of boots and a specimen box. For all her bee-like bustle, her endless lists and meticulous packing, she’d been so sure the course started on a Saturday that she’d failed to double-check the actual date. As she began to panic about her stipend, which wouldn’t cover the extra nights in the hotel, not the extra meals or even an extra bar of soap, a woman in a green dress rose from an armchair across the room and called her over.

  “You’re one of my husband’s students?” she asked. The professor’s wife, Henrietta realized. Who had herself written several books, and joined many of her husband’s expeditions. “What’s happened?”

  Abashed, Henrietta explained her situation. As she finished, the woman, who’d been nodding and smiling kindly throughout, glanced over at the men and then returned her attention to Henrietta. “You’ll travel with us tomorrow,” she said. The skin around her small dark eyes was soft and crinkled. “It’s not a problem, if you don’t mind roughing it with us until the rest of the students arrive.”

  That night Henrietta slept in a tiny room,
with a dormer window that leaked and a ceiling so low that she could press her palm against it. The sound of water dripping onto tin made her dream of the buckets she and her sister, Hester, set in the springhouse at home. The rain continued as she woke and dressed and trailed the professor and his wife to the waterfront, where at last she saw the sea—or not the sea, exactly, but a crowded harbor dense with docks and masts. At Oswego, schooners had also crowded against each other along the busy port. But that was a lake, not the sea, and there she’d been a struggling student, sharing sinks and bad food, washing her own clothes between classes with the other girls come from similar small towns and farms. Here—she grasped her bags more firmly—here she was a woman with a teaching certificate, about to start a course she couldn’t have afforded on her own.

  The boat awaiting them was bigger, but not by much, than the wooden sailboat her mother used at home. The professor and his wife sat inside the small cabin and she sat outside, across from a mound of packages, between two women in gray dresses, beneath a piece of canvas strung up as an awning. After an hour the rain stopped, and although she’d dreaded seasickness she felt fine. When the captain said, “That’s it,” she leaned over the rail and saw a small island, curved like a comma, completely unimposing.

  At the dock she stepped from the boat and saw gulls, a mound of dirty hay, a huge pile of packing crates, and another, larger boat pulling away, half the workmen leaving, on this Saturday afternoon, for their weekend holiday. A man the age of Henrietta’s father greeted the professor and said in a harried tone that he’d been there since early Friday and had rescued the newly delivered dormitory furniture. Fifty-eight beds and blankets and pillows, fifty-eight pairs of sheets and chamber sets—all, he said, as they moved along the sandy shore, piled into the barn that was meant to serve as their kitchen and lecture room.

  The barn toward which he gestured, and from which the sheep had only just been moved, stood near an old house and a partly finished new building. Near it were planed boards, stacks of shingles, wheelbarrows, shovels, casks of nails—but not a sign of the microscopes or nets and dissecting trays which, Henrietta thought despairingly, the advertisements for the course had led her to expect. All night she’d fought the feeling that she’d made a terrible mistake. The boat’s captain consulted with the women dressed in gray, who were hanging back uneasily. The older one, who had signed on to cook—she’d earlier mistaken Henrietta for another of the servants—now declared that she was going back to the mainland. Her younger sister, who had looked envious when Henrietta stammered that she was actually one of the students, agreed that she too would leave.

  But the house was almost ready, the man supervising the site assured them. The situation was better than it looked. He gestured toward the figures picking their way through the planks, ferrying bedrolls like a line of ants across the sandy ground to the barn: those were the remaining carpenters, moving out of the house and making room. The sheep were on their way back to the mainland and the workers would follow when they were done. At the news that there was a place off the pantry prepared for them, the cook and her sister decided to stay, while the professor nodded happily on hearing that he and his wife could settle upstairs as planned, along with the other teachers when they arrived.

  “And you,” the professor’s wife said kindly, turning to Henrietta. “Until the rest of the students show up.”

  “Thank you,” Henrietta said, trying to cool her burning cheeks. Soon everyone would be here and she’d be invisible. Near the tip of her boot a little black cricket popped into the air and the professor, sweeping his arm to include not only the cricket but the land, the house, the barn, the sand, the birds and oysters and eelgrass, said, “A rich man donated all of this to us.”

  How, Henrietta wondered, did one get given an island? The same way, she supposed, he’d been given a museum, a university department, a staff, a wife who seemed able to read his mind. Not once, either last night or this morning on the boat, had he mentioned where the students would sleep or eat, instead speaking rapturously about all they’d study. Taxonomy and paleontology, the embryology of radiates and the anatomy of articulates, the physiology of vertebrate fishes, techniques of microscopy, dissection and specimen preservation, the chemistry of the sea. Or some selection of those things: he didn’t believe in a set curriculum. They would follow, he said pleasingly, where the book of nature led.

  “You’ll see,” said the professor’s wife, patting Henrietta’s arm and pointing out the attractions of the buildings they passed. The barn would be divided into a kitchen and a large dining hall, which would also serve as a lecture room. The empty dormitory, shaped like a giant H, would soon have on its upper floor twenty-nine sleeping rooms for the male students, lining both walls of one long wing, and the same number for the women in the other, with dressing rooms in the short connecting wing. Two enormous workrooms would fill the first floor, each lined with rows of tables and aquaria.

  Would, would—but so far the dormitory had no floors at all and the barn floor was only half-laid, cartons and furniture trailing off into packed dirt. No walls had yet been built and there were no signs of either a kitchen or a lecture hall. The foreman explained that his remaining men would work for a few more hours and then leave in the morning for their Sunday holiday. For a moment Henrietta thought of joining them. Then she put down her bag, followed the cook and her sister into the house, seized a broom and, as if she were back home, cleaning up after a family gathering, began sweeping together the sand and tufts of grass and bits of tobacco left behind by the workmen.

  The cook lit the stove, boiled water, found a frying pan and some eggs; her sister washed cups and plates. Sweeping the detritus out the door, Henrietta watched the professor, his white hair waving gaily in the breeze and his cuffs flapping over his wrists, convince the workmen of the importance of his summer school for the study of natural history. They would stay through Sunday and Monday too, the men agreed, giving up their day off in an effort to finish the dormitory before the students arrived.

  “Aren’t they kind?” said the professor’s wife, coming up behind her. She’d found an apron, which she dropped over Henrietta’s head. “Sacrificing their holiday like that? We’ll follow their example.”

  What they accomplished during the next three days would later, when Henrietta looked back on it, seem simply impossible. The carpenters worked until it was too dark for them to drive a nail, laying the floors in the dormitory, finishing the barn floor and raising a partition that set off the lecture room, finally installing the big stove in the kitchen. In the dormitory they didn’t have time to divide the long spaces into bedrooms, but they did enclose several dressing rooms and wall off the men’s side from the women’s. Henrietta, the professor’s wife, the cook, and her sister unpacked and washed and put away hundreds of plates and cups and saucers and glasses and a clattering mound of silverware, then repeated the process with the chamberpots and basins and ewers. They unwrapped the furniture, organized the move across the yard, swept the shavings from the new dormitory floor, and had the men arrange the beds against the walls so that each had its own window overhead. Sheets, blankets, and pillows spilled from the crates and settled on those beds, which along with the chamber sets marked off imaginary rooms.

  The clean white linens glowed against the pine and the windows offered squares of sky through which moved clouds, terns, gulls, geese, ducks, an occasional osprey, and, on the side facing the shore—Henrietta had chosen as her own the fourth bed, equally far from the stairwell and the dressing room—miles of Buzzards Bay. She slept there on the night before the rest of the students arrived, leaving behind the sofa where she’d been camped. The building was so quiet that from her window she could hear the tips of the eelgrass brushing against the sand.

  OF THE FIFTY-EIGHT applicants the professor had selected, forty-two arrived on Tuesday, those who canceled—all women, he noted with surprise—apparently frightened off by reports of the unfinished buildings. But th
at was plenty, the professor thought, a strong group, young teachers themselves, come to be trained by him. Twenty-nine men and thirteen, no fourteen women: he’d forgotten to count Henrietta, who’d been working hard since Saturday and who, at meals, listened to him so attentively. When he pointed out an osprey’s nest or the pattern the mussels formed on the pilings she seemed to register every word, and when she was sharing tasks with his wife she took direction easily, always an excellent sign in a student. Although he was tired, indeed he hadn’t been feeling well for months, the sight of her made him eager to teach again. He had not had a real disciple in years, and the prospect of a young woman, as hungry for knowledge as his own wife had once been: what did he care if the lecture room wasn’t finished? Brilliant sunlight outside, velvet shadow past the threshold; he stepped through the double doors, drawing deep, delighted breaths. He’d taught in tents, on glaciers, on boats, in basements. This was luxury, standing on fragrant new boards with twenty feet of air above him, the cool shade pierced by swallows swooping between the rafters, darting in and out.

  The room grew quiet. He knew he was ready. Behind him, on the blackboard hastily mounted to the new wall and concealing the sight but not the sounds or the smells of the cook and her helpers preparing lunch, were the first of the chalk drawings he’d use to lead the students to the truth. He opened his mouth and whole paragraphs leapt smoothly out, one suggesting the next, each familiar but delivered this time in a different order, a different context. The paragraph on the divine order of nature knitted gracefully onto the paragraph about how we could learn more from a single living grasshopper, closely observed, than from twenty dusty books. One paragraph came directly from something he’d written himself: All the facts proclaim aloud the one God, whom man may know, adore, and love; and Natural History must in good time become the analysis of the thoughts of the Creator of the universe, as manifested in the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Another paragraph spoke of the great tradition this school embodied, the lineage of Cuvier and Humboldt passing directly from them to him, on to all his earlier students, and now to those before him. Soon he’d spoken the paragraph of thanks to his supporters, and the paragraphs introducing the other teachers: the six former students, now his friends, middle-aged themselves, responsible for different areas of natural history. Then came the lines in which he instructed the students to stand and introduce themselves.