Archangel

by Andrea Barrett

  Soon enough, though, he got caught up in the life of a place that at first had felt to him like nowhere. His better students were curious and eager to learn, and he found that he had to hurl himself at a problem again, simply to give them something to do. He started a genetics course in addition to his sections of general biology; he bought a little house with two large trees; he met a woman he liked, who planted vegetables in his backyard and taught him how to cook chard. The college gave him an excellent incubator, as well as some other crucial equipment. Through the fly-exchange network he was able to get some useful stock, which in turn put him in touch with many of the researchers trained in Morgan’s lab: not only Axel but also Harold and George (that was how he first met them) and, inevitably, Duncan, who immediately mailed to Sam’s new address all the papers he’d published while Sam was abroad. Once Sam solved some difficulties with mites and temperature fluctuations, he was back in business and, after hiring a couple of student helpers, began a new set of experiments. For one particular project, he used Elizaveta’s flies.

  When the fly cultures he’d smuggled in were established, he turned, with a sense of recovering his younger self, to investigating them. Like some of the curiosities naturalists had noticed and collected for years—crustaceans with legs where jaws or swimmerets should be, plants with petals transformed into stamens—Elizaveta’s flies shared the property that one organ in a segmental series had been transformed into another. How were those homeotic mutants produced? And were those variations heritable or caused by damage to the developing embryo? An acquaintance of Axel’s had discovered a true-breeding homeotic mutant he called bithorax, in which the little stabilizing structures normally found behind the forewings had been transformed into a second set of wings; Elizaveta had worked with that four-winged mutant, and also with an even odder one called aristapedia, which had legs growing where the antennae should be. Endlessly fascinating, Sam thought, and he began to investigate how a mutation to a single gene could cause such massive effects.

  Months passed, a year of hard work passed; thousands of cultures and tens of thousands of flies. In the mutant, he learned, the antennal discs developed early, at the same time as the leg discs, allowing the evocator that normally instructed the leg discs to act on the antennal discs as well. Evocator: he loved that word. The chemical substance that acts as a stimulus in the developing embryo. How intriguing, how sensible, really, that the mutant gene didn’t build a leg-like structure out of thin air. Instead it acted more simply and generally, altering the rate of development so that a whole pattern of growth occurred at a time and place where it ought not to be.

  Others were working on this as well, but there was so much to do, along so many branching paths, that Sam had no sense of racing to solve a problem before someone else. Rather, the whole world seemed to shimmer, a delectable feeling he’d first had as a boy, working with Mr. Spacek: the act of throwing himself at one problem, this problem, lit up every other aspect of his experience in the world. Legs grew out of a fly’s head because of a small change in timing; would his life have been different if his father had died earlier, or later? If he hadn’t met Mr. Spacek when he did, or gone to college at sixteen and found Axel willing to teach him. If he hadn’t met Avery or Ellen, hadn’t met Duncan …

  In this state of excitement, he’d gone to the congress in Edinburgh, where he presented his results and then connected that work with Goldschmidt’s, with work on position effects and the possibility that the particles of heredity might move around, with the possibility that maybe all genetic changes were changes in development. Maybe genes weren’t particles after all, weren’t arranged like beads on a string, but were more like spiderwebs, susceptible to the influence of events in the cytoplasm; maybe they weren’t quite as impregnable to outside influence as previously thought? He aimed his ideas at his former Russian colleagues, who should have been there but weren’t; at Axel, who was there but had missed all the groundwork; at Muller, who’d found a temporary haven in Edinburgh and who, although distracted by the responsibilities of hosting the congress, still found time to come and listen to him. He sailed past his notes, avoiding the missteps of Kammerer and Lysenko, which he knew more vividly than most. Carefully, he speculated about the question of timing. When, in the course of development, might a tiny change cause massive later effects? Might inheritance not be far more complex than we’d guessed? When he finished speaking and looked out at the disgruntled faces in the audience—Duncan’s face was red, Axel was poking his notepad with a pencil, Muller was gazing at him quizzically—he had a separate thought, which had nothing to do with inheritance. The first big leap he’d taken, with Kammerer’s work, had turned out to be wrong. Was it possible that now no one could see the rightness of this second big leap, because of his first mistake?

  TWO BRIGHT WHITE ships, crisp and military-looking with broad red stripes across the bow, came out of the distance to meet them when they were still several hundred miles from Halifax. Sailors from the Coast Guard cutters transferred food, which they needed badly—oranges! Sam saw, and apples and cheese, potatoes and meat, fresh bread!—along with toothbrushes and hairbrushes, soap, shampoo, donated clothing, more blankets. Two doctors, wanting to examine the wounded to see who might need the alignment of broken bones checked with their portable X-ray machine and who should be transferred to the cutters for care, also came aboard.

  For the first time in more than a week, Sam brushed his hair, cleaned his teeth with something other than a finger, and along with everyone else dipped into the new supplies to spruce up for that night’s celebration. Officers from the cutters joined them, the captain extracted a case of whisky from the hold, a few passengers did what they could to decorate the deck while others, sensing home not far away, started to relax. All around him, Sam saw groups of people, faces suddenly scrubbed shades lighter, smiling and talking with the friends they’d made on the journey. These women bound to those, these students to those sailors; the college girls—for him, still simply pleasant acquaintances—more closely attached to Duncan and Harold and George than he’d understood.

  He felt, for a moment, unusually alone—more so when he saw that Axel, standing only a few feet away as the whisky was handed around, was barricaded by Duncan and Harold and George. Fanning out from them were Laurel and Pansy and Maud, talking to a young man Sam hadn’t met; Lucinda, playing cards with the plant physiologist he’d first seen the day they were rescued; and Bessie and Aaron, sitting on one of the hatches, watching the constellations rise in the sky. Sam went over to Bessie’s side as Pansy asked the young man what he planned to do when he got home.

  “I’m still in school,” he said shyly.

  Sam looked up, spotting the stars of Pegasus. He remembered sitting on his father’s shoulders, following the line of his arm as he traced out shapes overhead. Look at the horse, do you see the dolphin? There’s a whale … Or did he remember those shapes from other evenings, much later, with his mother?

  “I’m an art student,” the young man continued. “I was traveling on a fellowship. But now …”

  “You’ll go back when the war is over?” Maud asked.

  “What’s the point?” he said. “Without my friend.”

  As Sam continued to pick from the glittering sky all the constellations he could remember, the student described how he and a dear friend from their school in Boston had split a traveling scholarship meant for one of them so that they could both see Europe. Despite their pinched budget and the signs of war cropping up everywhere, they’d visited Paris, Amsterdam, Verona, Venice, and even Berlin before returning to London, which they’d reached about the same time Sam reached Edinburgh. They too had found their ship home from Glasgow commandeered and later sailings either booked or canceled; they too had boarded the Athenia as a last resort. After the torpedo struck, he and his friend had managed to stay together in one of the last and most crowded lifeboats, which was also the one that had swung too close to the Knute Nelson and been crush
ed by its propellers.

  “We dove into the water,” the student said. “We dove and then we swam until we found a plank to hang on to. After a while we were picked up by another lifeboat. By then the Southern Cross was near us, so we rowed there. And then we got too close to the back of that …”

  As his voice trailed away, Duncan, who had moved closer, said, “That wasn’t the boat …?”

  The young man nodded, looking over at Axel and Duncan, then down at the deck, as if embarrassed that others had already heard the story and that some had seen the boat overturned. How could anyone be so unlucky? Not one but two lifeboats wrecked beneath him, his friend by his side through the torpedoing, through the first lifeboat’s destruction, only to be lost. Sam closed his eyes. The ship rolled beneath him, a long, slow movement that made him dizzy. A hand touched his: Axel?

  Bessie, Sam saw, when he opened his eyes. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “The whisky,” Sam said faintly.

  “Let me get you some water,” she said, burrowing through the crowd. Duncan came up on Sam’s other side and poked his shoulder. Jovially, stupidly, looking exactly the same as he had all week—the new supplies had meant nothing to him—he said, “Too much to drink?”

  Where had Axel gone?

  Duncan stopped smiling. “You don’t look very well.”

  “Now you worry about me?” Sam said.

  An odd look crossed Duncan’s face. “What went on at the congress—that’s work. I don’t agree with your work; I want it buried. Doesn’t mean I want you buried. Until you came over the side of this ship, when I thought you might have drowned, I felt—”

  “Oh, please,” Sam said.

  “You’re impossible,” said Duncan. He pushed past Sam and toward Harold and George. Then, finally, Axel reappeared, his expression concerned and his hand stretched toward Sam.

  That night on the water, he’d scanned every boat they approached for Axel’s face. Then, it hadn’t mattered that they very seldom saw each other, that since Sam’s time in Russia—no, before that, even—since Axel’s marriage, perhaps, or since Sam had lost his first job and Axel hadn’t been able to help him, they had drifted apart. He’d come to the meeting in Edinburgh hoping to repair this, tracking Axel through the corridors and cocktail parties like a devoted beagle, but although they’d had pleasant moments and caught each other up on the trivia of their lives, they’d never had the one, real, deep conversation Sam had been missing for so many years. And when Duncan attacked him so vigorously, Axel had not defended him. He hadn’t supported Duncan—but he had not, in public, stood up for Sam. Instead, afterward, he’d pulled Sam toward a bench beneath a holly tree and questioned him closely about his results. Then he said—Sam felt this simultaneously as a blessing and a dismissal—that the work itself seemed promising. But why, Axel scolded, would he expose it to the world at such an early stage! If he would only stop speculating in public …

  “It’s all right,” Axel said quietly. “It’s all right. It wasn’t as bad as all that.”

  “What wasn’t?” Sam asked stupidly.

  “When our boat overturned, under the stern of the Southern Cross—I saw you turn pale when that young man was speaking, the one we’d pulled from the water earlier, with his friend. I was afraid you might be thinking of what had happened to me and how much worse it might have been. But it wasn’t so terrible, not really. I was in the water for a while but I didn’t know I was hurt, I couldn’t even feel the gash on my head. And I had an oar to cling to, and it wasn’t too long before the crewmen from the Southern Cross found me and got me aboard. And then once I got here, and Duncan tracked me down, he arranged everything. If you were worrying about me, please don’t.”

  How was he only now learning for sure what had happened to Axel? If they’d had time alone together, if they’d been able to talk … why hadn’t Axel ever come to him?

  “That’s what happened to you?” Sam said now. “That night in the boat?” It wasn’t so much what changed in the environment that altered a living organism; it was the when. A question of timing. When in the course of development does the event arrive that initiates the cascade of changes? “That’s what happened?” he repeated.

  “You knew that,” Axel said. “Didn’t you? I assumed …”

  That Duncan had told him, Sam understood. That Duncan had relayed to him whatever Axel, stretched out on his berth, the bandage stuck to his oozing wound, had said. Axel must have told the story of his night on the water to Duncan, who lay on the floor in the place where Sam should have been. Perhaps he’d also relied on Duncan for whatever image he had of Sam’s own night; he’d never asked Sam. “Duncan,” Sam said feebly.

  “I know,” Axel said. “Really, I do know—he can be so exasperating sometimes, he probably told you more than he should have, he’s always too dramatic. And he forgets how attached we are. I don’t think it even occurred to him that you might be upset by hearing that something bad happened to me. Any more than he seemed to understand, in Edinburgh, how much he’d hurt me by attacking you.”

  Sam stared at him blankly. “But Duncan,” he said, “the way you are with him …”

  “I do the best I can,” Axel said. “You must have found yourself in similar situations with students. You know how sometimes you have to treat the one you actually feel least close to as the favorite, just so he won’t lose confidence entirely?”

  “I do,” Sam said miserably. Not that he’d ever felt treated as a favorite, but he knew what Axel meant: he’d always acted more kindly toward Sam than he really felt, so that Sam wouldn’t be too crushed to go on.

  “I’ve always had to do that with Duncan,” Axel said. His bandage, unpleasantly stained, had shifted farther back on his head. “I still do, I find, in certain situations. And here—what could I do? He wanted so badly to take care of me.”

  “You gave him his start,” Sam said, not knowing what he meant.

  “It’s a good thing I can count on you to understand,” Axel said. The ship rolled gently, following the long, slow waves. “You’re strong enough to go your own way. That’s part of what makes your work so interesting. And part of what gets you into trouble.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, still a day and a half out from Halifax, Axel and five other passengers were transferred to one of the cutters, which had excellent hospital facilities. The wound on his head wasn’t healing properly; the Coast Guard doctor wanted to debride and resuture it without further delay. Sam, left behind with Duncan and Harold and George, could do nothing but wave goodbye and hope that they’d find each other later.

  At the docks, a huge crowd greeted them, Red Cross nurses and immigration officials, family members of some of the survivors, local citizens who wanted to help, reporters from various papers: they were big news. Theirs had been the first ship sunk and theirs the first Canadian and American casualties; when the torpedo struck the Athenia, not even half a day had passed since Britain and Germany had gone to war. Nurses moved in to tend to the wounded; volunteers brought coffee and sandwiches; officials herded them into the immigration quarters, where they arranged baths and offered clean clothes. Scores of reporters moved in as well, eager for stories—what had they seen, what had they felt?—and then all the passengers began to talk at once, a hopeless tangle.

  How could Sam be surprised when Duncan stepped forward? Of course it was Duncan who, never having set foot on the Athenia, still somehow managed to simplify, generalize, organize the scattered impressions. The reporters turned toward him, relaxing, already making notes: so much easier to follow his linear narrative, spangled with brief portraits of the survivors and vivid details of the crossing! He’d listened closely, Sam saw, to accounts of what he hadn’t experienced himself. Bits of Axel’s story flashed by, along with elements of the art student’s, the plant physiologist’s, Bessie’s, and more. Bessie looked startled, as did some of the others, but what Duncan recounted wasn’t untrue; it just didn’t match much of what Sam felt, or what he knew t
o be important. If Duncan were to tell the story of Sam’s working life it would, he knew, be similarly skewed—yet who knew him better than Duncan? Who had been with him for as much of the way?

  Only Axel, who, leaving the City of Flint for the cutter, had held his hand to his stained bandage, looked crossly at the doctor, and said, “Really, I’m fine. I don’t know why you want to move me like this. I’d rather stay here with my friends.” And then had gestured toward Duncan and Sam, on either side of him.

  Archangel

  (1919)

  The first time she saw him, he was driving a sleigh. Not one of the boxy Red Cross ambulance sleighs, but a rough peasant sleigh with a frame of lashed saplings riding low between the runners. His chin rested on his chest; his hands lay loosely in his lap; the reins looped onto his knees, depriving the little pony of any instructions. The snow in the street was firmly packed, neither icy nor badly rutted, and the pony walked patiently, in a straight line, as if planning to continue past the hospital courtyard to the edge of the White Sea. A long bundle, half buried in hay, lay next to the driver—who must, Eudora realized, be sound asleep.