Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

The air was warm, the water gleaming like steel and the icebergs elevated against the horizon. The men had stripped off most of their clothes. Mr. Tagliabeau was urging them on at the capstan bars when the lookout shouted, “We’re here!” and the brig broke into open water. All hands stopped work and gave three cheers. Mr. Tagliabeau and Captain Tyler embraced one another and then, to Erasmus’s astonishment, shook Zeke’s hand. Joe broke out his zither and played several cheerful tunes; Captain Tyler ordered the sails set; and they were free of the pack.

I n her diary, Alexandra wrote:

On the calendar Lavinia keeps by our desks, she not only crosses off each passing day but counts the days remaining until October. She’s embarrassed when I catch her doing this, embarrassed to catch herself doing it. When we visit Zeke’s family, she wraps her arms around Zeke’s black dogs and buries her nose in their fur; the smell reminds her of him, she claims, his clothes often carried a faint odor of dog. But otherwise she puts up a brave front and tries not to talk about her worries.

Still, I can see how distracted she is and how hard she finds it to concentrate. Apart from her anxieties, she’s not used to sustained periods of work- I remind myself that at least I had my parents throughout my childhood, while she had no mother at all: of course this has shaped her, as has life with her brothers. On Tuesday, while we were trying to mix a difficult shade of greenish blue, she told me she was often invited to join in when their father read to them — if she wasn’t taking drawing lessons, or piano lessons, or being instructed in cookery or the management of the household — but she listened with only half an ear, sure she’d never use that knowledge. Erasmus and Copernicus would travel; Linnaeus and Humboldt would learn to engrave the plates and print the books that resulted from other men’s travels. But always, she said, always I knew I’d be left at home. So why bother to learn those lessons well?

Because, I wanted to say. Because there is something in the learning; and because we can never tell what we may someday need. Instead I pointed to our paints. When you were taking drawing lessons, I said, did you ever thinly we’d be doing this? It is my hope to distract her with the pleasures of our task?

We completed the plates of the annelids today and then Lavinia worked on her trousseau, arranging piles of embroidered white lawn and ribbon-threaded muslin. Waists and knickers, nightgowns and petti coats — most made by two young sisters, half-French, from Chester. Her own stitching is clumsy, but she’s good enough not to ask me for help even though she knows I’ve sometimes supported myself by sewing. I told her something she didn’t know about me — in her back issues of the Lady’s Book, which she saves religiously, I pointed out the plates I colored by hand for Mr. Godey. A gown in green and yellow, not so different from a beetle’s wing covers, made her smile. ‘“You could do this,” I told her. “If you don’t like working with plants and animals, I could help you find work coloring fashion plates when we’re done with the book.” She told me her brothers would think that frivolous work especially as she has no need to earn her living.

We have two pair of cardinals nesting in the mock-orange near my window. A cecropia moth hatched from the cocoon Erasmus left on the windowseat. Last night my family came for dinner, and after we talked about the antislavery speeches Emily attended in Germantown, Harriet took me aside to whisper that she is with child again. Then Browning clumsily asked if we’d had any news. Of course this upset Lavinia. No mail, I answered quickly. Not yet. But it’s too soon for the whalers with whom the brig might cross paths to have returned to port.

After they left we read out loud to each other, as we do most evenings. Lavinia reads from Mary Shelley’s tale of Frankenstein and his monster; I read from Parry’s journal. The journal of the first voyage, when Parry was hardly older than Zeke and when his men were all in their early twenties; the one during which everything went right. Fine weather, remarkable explorations, good hunting, starry skies. This is how Zeke and Erasmus are faring, I said.

But later, after we went to our separate rooms, I read secretly in the journal of Parry’s second voyage. I never raise the subject of the Winter Island and Igloolik Esquimaux with Lavinia; if she knew what Parry hinted at about the women and their relationships with his men, she’d worry about this too. I lie in the dark and dream about that place and those people. I’d give anything to be with Zekf and Erasmus. Anything. I’m grateful for this position but sometimes I feel so confined — why can’t my life be larger? I imagine those Esquimaux befriended by Parry and his crew: the feasts and games, the fur suits, the pairs of women tat tooing each other, gravely passing a needle and a thread coated with lampblack and oil under the skin of their faces and breasts. I dream about them. I dream about the ice, the snow, the ice, the snow.

SURROUNDED BY THAT ice and snow, Erasmus dreamed of home — less and less often, though, as the brig passed down Lancaster Sound. Around him were breeding terns and gulls, snow geese and murres, eiders and dovekies; the water thick with whales and seals and scattered plates of floe ice; a sky from which birds dropped like arrows, piercing the water’s skin. Sometimes narwhals tusked through the skin from the other side, as if sniffing at the solitary ship. They hadn’t seen another ship since passing a few whalers at Pond’s Bay, yet Erasmus was far from lonely. Dazzled, he looked at the cliffs, and knew Dr. Boerhaave shared his dazzlement.

“Anchor,” he begged Zeke. “Let us have some time up there.”

But Zeke said their schedule didn’t leave a minute to spare. Finally, when they tied up to an iceberg to take on fresh water, Erasmus was granted four hours. Ned and Scan Hamilton rowed him and Dr. Boerhaave to the base of a kittiwake rookery.

“We’ll climb,” Erasmus told Dr. Boerhaave. He was trembling, longing to split himself into a hundred selves who might see a hundred sights. “Straight up, and gather what we can.” To Ned and Scan, wandering along the bouldered shore, he handed a small cloth bag. “Put plants in here,” he said. “If you see anything interesting, while you’re walking. .” Then he and Dr. Boerhaave began their ascent up the bird-plastered rock, guns and nets strapped to their backs.