Archangel

by Andrea Barrett

  The wind blew, the water rippled, an osprey dove and came up with an eel. She worked back once more through certain paragraphs, absorbing what Mr. Darwin called his three great facts. First, neither the similarity nor the dissimilarity of the plants and animals inhabiting various regions could be accounted for by climate or physical conditions: although certain parts of South Africa and of Australia were much alike, the inhabitants were utterly different. Second, wherever significant physical barriers to migration existed—oceans, great deserts, mountain ranges—very different inhabitants existed on either side. Third, and this one struck her most deeply, was what he called the affinity of species inhabiting the same continent or sea: a deep organic bond that was, he claimed, simply inheritance. Affinity, if she understood his argument rightly, had nothing to do with Divine plan but rather indicated simply common descent—which was what her teachers had evaded, and also what the professor denied most vigorously. The mackerel and cod and bluefish and bass were related to each other, sharing ancestors as she and Hester shared ancestors with their second cousins, with whom they had little in common except for … well, their general shape and size, and their white skins that freckled in summer, their close-set eyes and curled upper ears and a certain curiosity about the world. So obvious, once he’d made her see it. So shocking.

  Out on the dock on a moonlit evening, bringing up nets coated with luminescent plankton, she and Daphne went through all the arguments again. How tame, Henrietta thought, her schooling had been! The attitudes passed to her by her mother and teachers, a kind of worship, she thought now, which had made her tremble before the professor when she first got off the train, fell away. “You’re right,” she said. Her mother knew none of this. “Mr. Darwin’s right. It changes everything, doesn’t it?”

  “Everything,” Daphne agreed.

  THE DAYS ASSUMED a rhythm, and then the weeks. Tuesday and Thursday evenings they sang in the barn; Friday evenings, if the weather was fine, they ate on the beach. Sunday mornings they gathered for services and then students and teachers alike had an early dinner and a few free hours afterward. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons they botanized, mapping the distribution of land plants and seaweeds from the land through the littoral zone and into the shallows of the bay. The professor was especially interested in Charles’s excavation of the trench, in the rise of grassy land above the salt marsh.

  One Wednesday afternoon he climbed down into the trench, aided by the six students who’d done most of the digging and hammered the ladder together. They’d dug cleanly and well: the surface of the meadow was above the top of his head and in the sharp, almost vertical wall, he could clearly see the roots of the grasses penetrating the shallow layer of humus and the lighter brown layer just below that where more sand mingled with the rotted organic material. Farther down, dotted with embedded stumps and bones, were layers of gravel and glacial till.

  “Very nice,” he said to Charles, who was still loyal, still a fine assistant, but no longer young. What would happen to Charles when he was gone? For months now he’d felt his energy diminishing, and the pains in his eyes, which sometimes brought with them confusion, increased each week. The cerebral hemorrhage he’d had a few years back made him dread the future. To the students he said, “Think about using teaching demonstrations like this with your own classes. There’s no substitute for digging through the layers with your own hands and seeing with your own eyes.”

  One of the young men—Edward?—nodded. “In my part of Ohio,” he said, “they’d learn more than geology. You can’t dig down more than a couple of feet without finding Indian remains.”

  “Even better,” the professor said, and without quite meaning to started talking about the mound-building Indians of the Ohio. He meant to let them get back to work; he meant only to reinforce the idea, which this trench so beautifully showed, that one set of things lying above another, as fossils lay above each other in strata, did not in any way suggest that the beings of one layer had developed from those of another. One simply lay atop the other: succession, not development. Why make such an elaborate hypothesis for what could be so simply explained? And why accept the repulsive poverty of the material explanation? The resources of the Deity could not be so meager that, in order to create a being endowed with reason, he must change a monkey into a man.

  But why, if he meant to say that, was he talking about serpent-shaped earthworks and copper tools? And why, while his mouth framed those words, was he thinking again about Mr. Darwin and his theories? He had tried to make sense of them; really he had made an enormous effort. During his last convalescence, while he was stuck in his sickbed unable to walk or even to speak, youngsters had uncovered fossils in Montana and Wyoming that hinted, tantalizingly, at new relationships. They’d used those discoveries to support Darwin’s theories, writing papers in which, if he was mentioned at all, he was cast as a kind of dinosaur himself. So upsetting had this been that he’d set off on yet another journey, this time bringing with him all of Darwin’s important books. On the ocean, away from the bother of everyday life, he’d meant to consider this question of descent with modification as perhaps—he admitted this only to himself—he had not done thoroughly enough in earlier years.

  Down the Atlantic coast of both Americas, through the Strait of Magellan, up the Pacific coast to California. With the new deep-sea dredge he’d planned to sample the ocean bottom, bringing up specimens that might allow him to determine if species in the northern and southern hemispheres were possibly related. Instead the dredge broke again and again, and the ship itself often needed repair. So did he; he was often sick. During long hours in his berth, he flipped through the books but couldn’t concentrate. Places he’d hoped to visit had to be skipped; places he visited didn’t yield what he’d hoped. The shape of his own mind, he learned, was as fixed as the shape of his skull, a kind of instrument for registering patterns. The spiral of a narwhal’s horn like the spirals of willow leaves like the spiral of a snail’s operculum, all pointing clearly to a single underlying Mind. He reached San Francisco sure that the real work left to him lay in articulating clearly, to as many people as possible, the flaws in Darwin’s arguments and the strengths of his own.

  Which didn’t mean, he knew, that the students before him were fully on his side. Half or more of those here, he suspected, believed in Darwin’s theories even while respecting his own abilities as a naturalist and a teacher. None of them knew, as he did, how the theories seized on with such enthusiasm by one generation might be discarded scornfully by the next. He poked at a round stone embedded in the wall. One might find, layered in such a wall, a whale, a reed, a mackerel, a star-nosed mole, a liverwort. The relics of six discarded theories—or the traces of six young men with their shirtsleeves rolled up, shovels smoothing and scraping the trench while others sketched the section they’d so neatly uncovered.

  ON THE MORNING after the August full moon, Henrietta found herself in a little boat with Daphne, Edward, and the professor’s wife, who now behaved as if she hardly knew Henrietta. The china they’d scrubbed, the beds they’d made, their arms mirroring each other as they snapped sheets in the air, apparently counted for nothing in the light of the lectures Henrietta had skipped and her obvious absorption in something other than the professor. It wasn’t just the book, which Henrietta didn’t think the professor’s wife had seen. More likely it was the sight of her and Daphne talking so intently outside of class, and the way Daphne acted as a magnet for the other students interested in Darwin’s ideas. In the dining hall the tables were defined, now, by scientific beliefs as well as personal alliances. She and Daphne had places at the far end of the table nearest the door, among a particularly lively group—David, Rockwell, Charles, Lydia, and a few others—swayed by Darwinism. While the professor might not know what bound them, his wife surely did.

  Henrietta sat next to Daphne in the stern of their dory, facing Edward, who rowed; the professor’s wife sat in the bow, lecturing on the transformations
of the Acalephs. “An excellent example of alternate generations,” she said in her clear voice. Around them bobbed fourteen other dories, the rest of their little fleet. “To the untrained eye, their different phases appear so distinct and apparently unconnected that previous observers assumed they were separate species.”

  The sandbar flashed beneath the bottom of the boat. Into the water dipped Edward’s oars, the blades slicing the surface, pulling through the depths, rising, and then, with a deft roll of the wrist, flattening to slip through the air. Henrietta tried to visualize the sequence of transformations. “In the autumn, eggs of some species hatch into free-swimming globular bodies, covered with cilia. After a while these attach themselves to a solid surface and then assume a hollow hydroid shape. In early spring, buds appear on the hydroids, each eventually assuming the shape of a medusoid disc that grows and then frees itself. The full-grown medusae of some species swarm together at this time of year, for the purposes of spawning.”

  One, two, three different stages. The sea was white and shining, the surface quiet but the whole mass undulating in long, slow, shallow swells. Sea urchins too, said the professor’s wife, underwent fantastic transformations. A narrow puddle at the bottom of the boat moved forward and back, forward and back, in time with Edward’s strokes, while the two buckets awaiting their specimens tilted gently from side to side and the stack of glass bowls clicked together, flashing as the sun hit the rims. The water was glittering too, the jumbled lights making Henrietta drowsy.

  “Again and again,” said the professor’s wife, her words drifting by, “we see one creature seem to change into another.” Henrietta touched elbows with Daphne, her friend as fresh and alive as a tree, and for a moment her soul stretched away from her body.

  Grub to beetle, larva to barnacle. Now the professor’s wife was speaking about the majestic and unexpected paths by which God arrived at the completion of his designs. “The Divine handiwork,” she concluded, “exists to remind us always of the greater wonder, the mystery of the moment when God became man.”

  Henrietta’s soul snapped elastically back into place. That wasn’t right; those two domains were best kept separate. She turned toward Daphne, who was frowning, and then she bent once more, searching for transparent creatures in transparent water. Her eyes were sore, her head ached, her stomach was announcing, with peculiar clarity, its exact contours.

  Splish, said Edward’s oars. Splish, splish.

  The professor, from the dory just ahead of theirs, called out a question to the fleet. “What are the three classes of Acalephs?”

  “The ctenophores,” said Edward. “And the discophores and the hydroids.”

  Daphne, whose lower back now touched Henrietta’s—they were leaning over opposite sides, skirts together, heads and arms far apart—said something Henrietta couldn’t hear. The professor’s wife told Edward to lift his oars once they rounded the rocky point. The bowls clicked, the edges flashed, and the drops falling from Edward’s oars sparkled like broken glass.

  “Look,” said Daphne, pointing down.

  Henrietta swallowed twice and leaned farther over the side. The water had thickened, clotted, raised itself into disconcerting lumps. Suddenly they were floating not on water but on a shoal of jellyfish so thick that the ones nearest the surface were being pushed partially out of the water by those below, and so closely packed that when Edward lowered one oar to turn the boat, he had to force a path between the creatures. All the boats, Henrietta saw, were similarly surrounded; the shoal formed a rough circle fifty feet wide, quivering like a single enormous medusa.

  “Pull close together!” the professor shouted from the dory ahead of them. “Now halt! Everyone!” He’d risen to his feet and was standing, his arms held out for balance, looking as though at any moment he might pitch into the sea but too delighted to care. He called out instructions, which his wife repeated more quietly as they stabbed their nets into the shoal. Henrietta worked with Daphne and Edward, trying in the excitement to sort the specimens properly. One bucket for the larger species; the other bucket for the Pleurobrachia and the other ctenophores; glass bowls for the most delicate creatures, which had to be kept separate.

  As Daphne and Edward were using the nets, Henrietta slid an empty bowl beneath a clear saucer pulsing like a lung: an Aurelia, thick and heavy at the center, thin and slippery at the edges, overhanging the bowl all around. The creature plopped disturbingly as she decanted it into a bucket. “Each of the metamorphoses of the Aurelia,” the professor was shouting, picking up where his wife had left off, “was once presumed to be a separate species. The hydroid phase was named Scyphostoma; the form with the buds stacked up was called Strobila. The first stage of the medusa, just after it separates and when it is small and deeply lobed, was called Ephyra. Only this stage you are seeing—the breeding adult—had the name Aurelia, although we now recognize all four as being forms of the same creature.”

  Henrietta shifted her canvas shoes, already soaked and stained, away from the wet nets dripping over the floorboards. In the bucket nearest her left foot, a little pink ctenophore mistakenly dropped among the larger jellyfish was presently being consumed. Was the Zygodactyla eating it nothing more than an enormous mouth? The other bucket glittered wildly, the sun refracting off the trailing ribbons of the Pleurobrachiae and the tiny fringed combs on the Idyia, which were darting back and forth. Waves of color, pink then purple then yellow then green, pink again, pinker still.

  “Such variety,” the professor’s wife said, leaning over Edward’s shoulder. By now they’d drifted to the edge of the shoal and Henrietta could see water again, the jellyfish scattered more sparsely here and there. “Such beauty.”

  Daphne, across from Henrietta, had both arms in the water and was struggling with her net. “Ugh,” she said, unable to heave whatever she’d found over the side. “What is this?”

  “Oh,” the professor’s wife said. “Well done!”

  As Edward moved the boat a few degrees, Daphne’s net shifted astern and then Henrietta could see the gigantic, reddish-brown transparent lump, as wide across as the boat, dangling brown and flesh-colored lobes from a ruffled white margin. A confused mass of tentacles, brown and yellow and purple, trailed behind it.

  To the professor, only a few feet away, his wife called, “Cyanea!”

  In response, he seized an oar from the student rowing his boat and used it to spin the bow around, nosing it into the side of the creature until only the huge disk of jelly separated his boat from Henrietta’s. He signaled the remaining boats to nose in similarly, forming a rough ring.

  “It’s too heavy to bring into our boats with the equipment we have,” he said. “And too fragile—its own weight would tear it apart as we tried to lift it. But we can look at it closely from here.”

  Those who could peered down at the water, some measuring the diameter—at least four feet, they agreed—others inspecting the lumpy ovaries, the mouth parts, the eye specks around the rim. The tentacles, the professor pointed out, were despite their apparent confusion actually gathered into eight distinct bunches. He directed one boat to back slowly away from the circle, following a set of tentacles until they disappeared—which was not, they found to their amazement, for thirty feet. The fair young rower, his face spattered with freckles, lifted his oar and showed the trailing ends draped across the blade. Meanwhile the professor continued to point out the structural similarities between the Cyanea and the Aurelia.

  Daphne raised her head from the mass of blubber and addressed the professor. “That’s intriguing,” Daphne said. “Those resemblances, those affinities, might well be seen as evidence that the two forms are related, sharing descent from a common ancestor.”

  The professor shook his head. “You are alluding to Mr. Darwin’s theories, I know,” he said.

  Of course he knew, Henrietta thought. He was tired and old, but he knew what they were reading, as he knew that Daphne was challenging him. Perhaps he even knew he was wrong, but still he
had to repeat his old lessons. How wearying this was! She wanted what he himself had told her to seek: the really real world. Before he could say anything else, Henrietta leaned over and thrust her hands into the water, toward the Cyanea. The surface felt smooth, surprisingly elastic yet yielding easily to the pressure of her hand. She slipped her left hand from the rounded body into the mass of soft tentacles. Almost instantly her hand began to sting and prickle, and then to burn. With a cry she pulled it out and sat up.

  “Oh dear,” the professor’s wife murmured. “I should have warned you—the name Acalephs alludes of course to their stinging or nettle-like properties. That won’t cause any lasting damage, but you’re going to be uncomfortable for a few hours.”

  The professor, looking across the blubber still poised calmly, apparently guiltless, among the surrounding boats, asked if Henrietta was all right.

  “Fine,” she said unsteadily. The pain was beginning to ebb but so too was all the sensation in her hand. As it grew numb, the pain moved into her head.

  “I’ve done that myself,” the professor said. “Just out of curiosity, as an experiment.” To the other students he explained that the stinging sensation Henrietta had experienced, and the numbness now creeping over her hand and wrist, had been caused by the myriad tiny cells, called lasso cells, that lined each of the twisting tentacles. “Each of these cells contains within it a tiny, tightly coiled whip, so fine we can hardly see it,” he said. “And each whip can be shot out, at the will of the animal, to sting its prey or—as Miss Atkins has so clearly but unfortunately just found—to defend against an attack. In concert, the whips act almost like a galvanic battery, paralyzing small prey and rendering a larger opponent at least partially helpless for a while.

  “Now, to address your Mr. Darwin’s arguments”—he gestured toward Daphne—“he himself has said that his theory would break down if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications. This is a perfect example. How could such a complex mechanism as a lasso cell have developed gradually, in tiny steps, by so-called ‘natural selection’? What possible use could half a lasso cell be, a filament that uncoiled but didn’t sting, or one that stung but couldn’t uncoil? How could such useless half-parts be ‘selected’? All the parts have to work in concert for the mechanism to work at all—and they could not work so well and precisely together unless they had all been designed at once by a Divine Intelligence.”