Archangel

by Andrea Barrett

  Two Johns, a Robert, Elias, Oscar, Katherine, Mary, Mary; Josietta, oddly rhyming with Henrietta, whom he liked. A Daphne, a Hazel, a Lily, a Rose, like a clump of flowers. The names flew past. Some taught at public high schools and some at normal schools or colleges, some were in their twenties while others were older—Benjamin, David, Claire—but all looked young to him, skin unmarked and eyes transparent. Later, he knew, the faces crowded around the three long tables and peering up at him would look less like rows of sea anemones. Later, as they asked questions or sat lumpishly mute, demonstrated a deft hand with a scalpel or botched the simplest drawing, he’d be able to distinguish some as individuals. For now they were like variations on a single underlying idea, their differences not uninteresting but in the end slight. Few, perhaps not even Henrietta, really grasped who he was. Some might know his books, others the museum he’d founded; a few might be familiar with his theory of glaciers; most knew he was famous but not exactly why. It was their parents who, a quarter-century ago when he could fill any city’s lecture hall, had really appreciated him and his work. That moment on the boat when Henrietta confided that her mother had been one among the thousands responding to his call for specimens had pleased him, at first, reminding him of those glorious days. Then wounded him with the reminder of his age.

  He leaned on his cane as they spoke. His knees hurt, one of his hips, the tips of his toes and his fingers; he was sixty-eight and his digestion was in shreds; he had cataracts in both eyes. Ahead lay weeks of morning lectures, afternoon demonstrations, expeditions, and conversations, day blurring into day and lecture into lecture. The nights would be his reward. On the beach, beneath the stars, near the soft hiss of water striking sand, he and his friends would relax at last, free to remember their own discoveries. The glaciers rolling down, reshaping the landscape; all year he’d been looking forward to these discussions. For now—he opened his mouth and from it poured a summary of the general characteristics of the vertebrates, the mollusks, the articulates, and the radiates.

  “Is this division of the animals into four groups,” he concluded, “the invention of a great naturalist? Or is it simply the reading of the Book of Nature? Can the book have more than one reading? If our classifications are not mere invention, if they are not an attempt to classify for our own convenience the objects we study, then they are thoughts which, whether we detect them or not, are expressed in Nature. So then Nature is the work of thought, the production of intelligence, carried out according to plan, therefore premeditated—and in our study of natural objects, we are approaching the thoughts of the Creator, reading his conceptions, interpreting a system that is his and not ours.”

  Two swallows darted past as he spoke, headed for the rafters, and half the young people assembled before him looked up.

  IN THE FIRST batch of mail for the students, delivered by the same little boat that had brought her to the island, Henrietta had a letter from her mother. After giving the family news, and wondering how Henrietta’s journey had gone and how her boots were holding up, she asked about the professor:

  What is he really like? I imagine him sitting down with you individually, showing you the secrets of a turtle’s egg or a minnow, but perhaps I imagine this wrongly and he doesn’t spend that much time with you. Does he lecture, or does he leave that to the other teachers? If you do get to talk to him alone, please tell him how much we treasure his books in our home, and how seriously we in our small village have taken his work. Your father and Hester send love, as do I.

  She’d written, Henrietta imagined, with those very books around her, her pen moving briskly while Hester, who had just turned twelve, fussed over the brood of tawny hens she’d raised herself. Already she dreamed of having a big family, while Henrietta had wanted only this. Because of the professor’s books, she’d sailed through the zoology questions on the entrance exam for Oswego: Give the names of the sub-kingdoms of animals. Give briefly the characteristics of each sub-kingdom, speaking particularly of the arrangement of the circulatory, digestive, and nervous systems. What mental and moral powers has the cat? Prove it. Describe your right hand.

  It should have been easy to write to her mother about their household god—but the truth, Henrietta thought as she folded the letter away, was that she had little to say, despite her early arrival at the island. During those three days of working like one of the servants, she’d shared meals with the professor and his wife and awaited his brilliant insights. Instead, he’d talked about the money due to the carpenters and kitchen staff, the price of coffee and sugar, the state of the sheets. He drank tea without sugar, she learned. Stripped the meat from fish heads and the marrow from bones. As his teaching staff trickled in, she also learned that he greeted old friends with a kiss on each cheek. Six times, while she occupied a place at the table where she had no right to be, she listened to the professor’s wife explain how Miss Atkins had mistaken the date, shown up at the inn in New Bedford wet and confused, accompanied them to the island, and then—“She’s been such a help!”

  Six times she smiled ruefully as the professor beamed across the table and agreed with his wife—and this was, apparently, the closest she was going to get to him. The minute the other students swarmed into the barn she’d felt herself disappear, one minnow among a shoal in dark skirts and striped shirtwaists, mingled with young men in loose jackets, all looking up at him. An honest report to her mother would read: I see him from the back of the room. From across the field. From the far end of the dining hall. He was simultaneously genial and boastful, brilliant, confused, brimming with life, half-asleep; unable to remember anyone’s name—he’d twice confused her with a woman from Bridgeport, whose dark curly hair resembled her own—yet strangely alert to their inner selves. I don’t understand a thing about him, she’d have to write. Any more than I understand if I like it here, or hate it.

  At first either too lonely, or too surrounded by company, she put off answering the letter. On Monday night she was alone in the empty, echoing dormitory; on Tuesday night it was filled with people; by Wednesday night, when she went upstairs after a day that seemed to have lasted a week, she found that the long, open, empty space had been not only populated but partially divided. Three beds along each wall had been enclosed like oysters within tiny planked rooms, which the workmen had built that afternoon. They’d build more each day, she knew. The professor’s lessons would be punctuated with the repeated tap-tap-TAP of nails being driven home, and each night the common room would seem smaller, the walls advancing toward her own bed until finally she too was enclosed. I wish, she might have written to her mother, that you and Hester were here. Or that I had a friend.

  In the dining hall she ate each meal with different students and compared notes with still others in lectures. The blind fish of the Mammoth Cave, she wrote, thought by some to demonstrate direct modification of an organism by the environment … At bedtime, in the women’s wing, she passed soap to the two Marys and chatted with Lily, who slept next to her, and with Laura and Katherine, whose beds faced hers. All of this, the patient rubbing of elbows and the accidental, meaningless intimacy, was familiar from her time at Oswego. But here everything seemed to happen more quickly and some of the students had already formed attachments. Already there were pairs and trios who always sat together at meals, walked together afterward—how had they so swiftly found companions?

  By Friday, when the entire class followed the professor, his wife, and two of the assistant teachers to the southwest tip of the island, for a lesson observing and collecting marine invertebrates, she was beginning to think that her days alone with the professor and his wife had done nothing but separate her from the other students. The professor, standing on a rock, said that because the grotto he’d found was accessible only from an hour before dead low tide until an hour after it turned, they would for the sake of efficiency be collecting in pairs. She stood uncomfortably behind a group who seemed at ease with each other, nodding seriously and exchanging glances as he rea
d their names from a list. Her new partner was someone she didn’t know, a slip of a girl she’d glimpsed darting down the stairs while the others were still dressing.

  On the rocks, where the professor lined them up, they faced a horseshoe of rocky ledges, roofed over by a boulder to form a watery cave. The professor perched on a wooden stool next to the boulder. At his command, the first pair, a high school teacher from Maine and an instructor at Antioch College, scrambled down the weedy rocks toward the grotto, pausing at the entrance.

  “Crawl right inside!” the professor encouraged them. He waved his cane and the wind rose, lifting strands of his white hair. “Don’t worry about getting wet!”

  The men disappeared, leaving visible only the soles of their rubberized canvas boots. Henrietta, clenching her bucket and pocketknife, stole a glance at her partner’s tiny feet. Above them the professor consulted his pocket watch. Five minutes later—only by such strict scheduling, he’d said, could they all see the place for themselves—he cried “Time!” and the two young men backed out and stood, grinning, guarding their sloshing buckets as they picked their way back to the shore.

  Two more pairs of men entered, and then it was time for the first pair of women. Henrietta realized, as the professor signaled, that she hadn’t quite registered her partner’s plant-like name. “Clover?” she said tentatively.

  “Daphne,” her partner responded. “Ready?”

  Henrietta nodded and they clambered over the stones. Somewhere in the writings of Ovid, a Daphne turned into a tree. And indeed her partner was as slim as a tree and had pale green eyes. They reached the opening in the rocks and paused.

  “Yesterday,” the professor said from above them, waving his cane encouragingly, “my wife was able to reach quite a few specimens by kneeling at the entrance and reaching inside.”

  Yesterday, Henrietta recalled, he’d reminded them all that their previous training meant nothing to him, and that he didn’t care what they already knew, or thought they knew. He was interested only in what they could learn by careful observation here. Both she and Daphne balanced themselves on their hands and knees and inched forward, lowering their heads beneath the lip of the roof. Although they’d folded the tops of their skirts around their belts, the hems were already wet and hung heavily around their calves. The sheer bulk of the material kept their lower halves outside the grotto.

  “How stupid our clothes are,” Daphne muttered.

  Henrietta tugged and shifted, but the folds of her skirt, which dragged on the shells and tore at the algae, kept blocking her way. No wonder the professor’s wife had stopped where she had. “Ridiculous,” she said, trying to fit herself alongside Daphne’s slim torso. From the shore they must look like a pair of handbells, stems slipped into the cave. Still, even if they couldn’t crawl inside as far as the men had, they could see all around.

  As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she spotted pink algae, red algae, and something that looked like tiny green tomatoes or grapes. Starfish, barnacles, and sea anemones everywhere, Metridium marginatum: some fully withdrawn into dull lumps of jelly, others showing a coy frill, the boldest drawn tall and waving their tentacles, purple or pink or white or brown, orange or scarlet, absurdly plant-like yet fully animal. When she touched one, the plumy fringe shrank and disappeared.

  Daphne, who had already pried loose several Metridium with her pocketknife, fixed her gaze on a patch of seaweed matted over one particular nook. “There is someone,” she said, moving like a cobra, “hiding under that …” She pounced and came up with a sea urchin. The walls were covered, Henrietta saw; the walls were entirely alive; more of the prickly mounds hid here and there, along with terraces of barnacles, which made room for rows of mussels, which gave way to clumps of sea anemones. Every inch of the rock was used in a way that seemed not random but purposeful, a pattern that, like the tiles on a floor, wasted no space but still allowed each creature access to the nourishing tide. How did that happen? She’d seen clumps of mosses and ferns make similar patterns at the Hammondsport Glen, near home.

  “Better hurry,” Daphne advised, sliding something from the blade of her knife. “We only have another minute or two.”

  Quickly Henrietta gathered a starfish, her own sea urchin, two sea anemones with waving white fronds and another mostly orange, three small crabs, a couple of mussels, algae red and green and pink, and a bit of Fucus encrusted with a kind of hydrozoan.

  “Time!” the professor called from above. The previous day he’d drawn a map of the western hemisphere on the board and then divided it into five zoological regions. Each was inhabited, he explained, by animals perfectly suited to that province, confined to those geographical limits. In each the animals were endowed with instincts and faculties perfectly corresponding to the region’s physical character. But because the climate of a country was allied to the peculiar character of its fauna, that didn’t mean that the one was the consequence of the other; were that the case, all animals living in similar climates would be identical. Rather, the perfect distribution signified the work of a Supreme Intelligence who created, separately and successively, each species at the place, and for the place, which it inhabits. The animals were autochthonoi: originating, like plants, on the soil where they were found.

  Henrietta’s wet skirts dragged as she lowered her head and began to move back into the sunlight. Did that mean, then, that the creatures in the grotto had each been created to fill its own tiny niche? That they were—did one use the adjective?—autochthonous? Wondering about this, trying to remember what, exactly, the professor had said, which had seemed far clearer yesterday, she set her knee down squarely on a patch of barnacles. As she jerked her leg she somehow kicked Daphne, who in an effort to steady herself overturned her bucket, letting out a cry louder than Henrietta’s.

  The professor leaned over the ledge, nearly falling from his stool as he called, “Are you all right?”

  Daphne, grasping futilely at her escaping prey, said something under her breath.

  “Barnacles,” Henrietta gasped. The sharp plates had razored through her skirt, but she was more concerned at the misery on Daphne’s face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was so clumsy—you’ll share what’s in my bucket?”

  Daphne pressed her lips together. “What choice do I have, now?”

  “Take some samples of your assailant!” the professor called genially. “The Cirripedia are fascinating, even if their armor is painfully sharp. God has so ordained that these creatures, who in their second larval stage resemble little shrimps, should swim about until they find a home and then cement themselves headfirst in place, transforming themselves into stony lumps that gather food by waving their feathery little legs. As miraculous, if you think about it, as if a creature born in the form of a perch should shed its skin to turn into an eel and then into a robin, only to glue its forehead to a rock and transform itself into a horse waving its hooves in the air.” He pointed at the blood staining Henrietta’s skirt. “You have been kicked, though. Do take care of that knee.”

  Daphne, loaning her a handkerchief and then spreading her own skirt wide to block Henrietta’s legs from view, said crossly, “If he wasn’t going to give us a chance to replace our lost specimens, he might at least have found a more original comparison.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Henrietta, dabbing at her wounds.

  “Comparing the stages of barnacles to a fish that turns into a horse—someone else said that, I read that in an old book about microscopy.” Pointing at Henrietta’s knee, she added, “You missed a spot.” And then, as Henrietta dabbed again, “Swish the handkerchief around in the water when you’re done. Then the stain won’t set.”

  Smart as well as practical, Henrietta noted. Not to mention sharp-tongued. Back at the laboratory, where the professor directed them to their workstations, she was pleased to learn that, for the next six weeks, she and Daphne would share not only the contents of a collecting bucket but an aquarium, a table, and a window.
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  “Lucky me,” Daphne said.

  Her lips twisted so briefly that Henrietta couldn’t be sure she saw the movement. Impulsively, she pushed the bucket across the table. “These are yours now, not mine. Could we start again? I’m not usually so clumsy.”

  Daphne looked at the bucket, at Henrietta’s hand on the bucket, finally at Henrietta’s face—and then she smiled, so openly that Henrietta felt a huge rush of relief. Together they decanted their specimens into glass bowls and jars and worked through the afternoon, exchanging quiet comments as the professor talked and strolled between the tables. One mussel they’d collected had a broken shell; they fed it to a hungry sea anemone and watched the tentacles draw it inside. After dinner, they listened to one of the assistant teachers talk about the remarkable ability of the holothurians, or sea cucumbers, to escape their predators by ejecting their viscera and later regrowing them.

  THE YACHT CONTRIBUTED by one of the professor’s friends from Boston arrived the following week; a colleague at the Coast Survey donated a dredging outfit; by the second weekend the students, grouped into boatloads of eight or ten, had all made at least one excursion, learned to use the implements, and collected some deep-water specimens. On the second Sunday, François spilled from the dredge an excellent example of a basket-fish, which obligingly gathered its five sets of finely branched arms around itself until it looked exactly like woven wicker. Later, as the deck dried and it began to want water, it relaxed into a lacy disk, arms extended around its pentagonal body.