Ann Patchett - State of Wonder

“Jump!” Alan said, jumping onto the boat himself with the rope in his hand. Immediately the current caught the boat and pulled it away from the shore. He turned around and reached his hand to Marina. “The entire tribe is going to be on board in five seconds,” he called. “Hesitation is the same thing as a straight-up invitation around here.”

It was true, the Lakashi were poised to begin boarding, all of them. Benoit pushed ahead of the pack and jumped without solicitation. He clearly meant to go somewhere, and Nancy followed him. Two more Lakashi leapt onto the boat but before they had gotten their balance Benoit tipped them back into the water, and then Marina jumped without ever meaning to go. Easter laughed at her flat-footed landing and she went and stood behind him, both of her hands on his shoulders. Every night they went to sleep separately, he in his hammock and she in her cot beneath the netting, and every night his dreams woke them both. His dreams, not hers, and she would go and scoop him up, bring him back in with her where they would sleep out the rest of the night in her little bed. They had gotten good at it. In only a week they had learned how to stretch and turn in unison.

The Lakashi were wading into the river and with the cross of breaststroke and dog paddle they favored, they swam. Marina looked at their dark heads in the water and wondered if she would have swum out too, just to have something to do. Nancy Saturn removed her hat and waved it at them, showing the short auburn hair she cropped herself. She called out an enthusiastic series of farewells — goodbye in English and tchau in Portuguese and then some sort of humming sound followed by a high pitched cry that essentially meant I am gone from you in Lakashi. After her fourth or fifth repetition they finally turned around and swam back to shore. It wasn’t as if they ever would have caught the boat. Easter was gunning the engine now that Dr. Swenson wasn’t on board.

“They only want a little recognition,” Nancy said, watching and waving as they fell farther and farther behind. “If you don’t acknowledge what they’re doing they just keep doing it. Frankly, I don’t think they’re such good swimmers. You can’t have half the tribe drowning on the way to the trading post.”

“Nancy would have made a great social behaviorist,” Alan Saturn said, dropping a very tan arm over his wife’s shoulders. “Dr. Rapp would have loved her. There were so many things we missed back then that Nancy picked up on the very first time she came out here.”

“You knew Dr. Rapp?” Marina asked.

Nancy raised her eyebrows briefly and then sighed with the recognition of what was to come. “How in the world did you miss that lecture?” she said, stepping out from under her husband’s arm and rifling through her bag for sunblock and bug gel. She handed one tube to Marina and began to use the other on herself.

Alan Saturn lifted his sunglasses to better show the delight in his eyes. “I was his student at Harvard! I was actually enrolled in that famous mycology class the year he broke his ankle in New Guinea and wound up coming back to teach for the entire semester. Those were the lectures that were published by Oxford University Press, and there have been no end of papers written on them. I’m sure you must have read some of them. There were a great many legends built up around that class. It was listed in the catalogue every year but Dr. Rapp virtually never made his way back to the classroom for more than a day or two. In reality it was taught by some graduate student who had been in the field himself and was qualified to do no more than read the notes and mark the tests. So while Studies in Mycology was considered to be one of the seminal classes at the university, no one but rubes actually signed up for it. Signing up for the class was as good as admitting you had no idea what was going on, so who better than me to enroll? When people realized what had happened, that the great man himself was coming back to teach, you had a situation where seniors and graduate students and in some cases faculty members were making cash offers to freshmen to give up their seats. I for one stood firm and was rewarded fortunes beyond that fifty bucks I turned down. I got to know Dr. Rapp that semester, I made sure of it, and so I was asked to travel with him in the Amazon for the next three summers in a row.”

“Is that how you met Dr. Swenson?” Marina thought of her teacher taking the trouble to catch the red-eye back from Manaus. To the best of her memory Dr. Swenson hadn’t missed a single class.

Nancy Saturn smeared a great handful of white paste across her face and began to rub it in. “To know Martin Rapp was to know Annick Swenson.”

“Don’t ruin the story,” Alan said to her. He turned his attention back to Marina, that untapped source of listening pleasure. “Annick is several years older than I am, of course.” This news was delivered for his own vanity, as Alan Saturn, with his thinning white hair, enormous white eyebrows, and perilously slender ankles, could easily have been taken as older than Dr. Swenson. The only thing that made Dr. Saturn seem younger was his younger wife. “She was coming down here years before me. They were, shall we say, quite inseparable in the field.”

“She picked the boys who went on the trips,” Nancy said. “Only boys. She held interviews in his office at Harvard. She was the one who picked Alan. Dr. Rapp didn’t have the time to fill the rosters himself.”

Marina could see him then, a tall and lanky undergraduate, a canvas rucksack on his back. “You knew him too?” she asked Nancy.

Nancy gave a small, snorting laugh and applied a layer of sunblock to her breastbone, reaching into the collar of her shirt to do the job right. “I came after Dr. Rapp.”

Alan Saturn was ignoring her now. He was launched. A giant tree had fallen into the river and the roots and branches reached up through the water as if begging to be saved. A bright yellow bird with a long, slender neck sat on one of those branches and watched the boat as it passed. Benoit, having spotted the bird, began his frantic turning of pages. “Martin Rapp was more than my teacher. He was the man I wanted to be. He was fully engaged with his life every minute that he lived it. He didn’t trudge along doing what someone else told him to do. He was never a cog in the wheel. He held his head up and looked at the world around him. Now, my father was a very decent man, worked as a tailor in Detroit back when there were men in Detroit who had their suits made. He worked until his hands were so twisted with arthritis he couldn’t hold a needle. If a man came into the store and told my father what he wanted, the only word my father had for him was yes. It didn’t matter if it was a ridiculous order, didn’t matter if this guy showed up on Saturday morning and wanted his suit for Saturday night and there was already work piled to the rafters, my father said yes. And once my father said yes it was as good as done because that word was all he had in the world. He spent his life in the backroom of a store and the only thing he knew about his environment was that needle going in and out of the cloth. He did all this so my brothers and I could go to college and not be tailors and have the luxury of telling somebody no someday. So off I went to Harvard, the tailor’s boy from Michigan. The next thing I knew I was sitting in a lecture hall and in walked the great Martin Rapp, his ankle sunk in a plaster boot, his crutches swinging forward. He came up to the lectern and he said, ‘Gentlemen, close your books and listen. We have nothing less than the world to consider.’ We were awestruck, every last one of us. We would have sat there for the full four years of college. I remember everything about that day, that room, the giant blackboards, the light coming in those leaded glass windows. What I saw in front of me was the character of a man. It was the most remarkable thing, and I’ve never had that experience before or since. It was some sort of aura he had. From ten rows away I knew exactly who he was and I knew I would follow him anywhere.”