Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

sessions. “No one knows,” she said, smoothing the edges of the tissue back together. “No one can ever know, Mr. Archibault would lose his job and your brothers would be furious, you can’t tell anyone. But I could help you, if you weren’t so stubborn…” She could help herself as well, she thought. Together they might work on a project she could claim partly as her own.

“You worked on his book?” Erasmus exclaimed. “How could you betray our family like that?”

Bewildered, she pressed the volume to her chest. “Your own brothers directed the engraving for the plates.”

“That was business!” Erasmus said. “They had no idea Zeke and I were in the same area as Dr. Kane. They thought I was dead, they didn’t know I was coming back.”

“And how would / have known that?”

“Would you just leave?” Erasmus said.

He turned his back and pulled his pillow over his head. After he heard the door close he fell asleep — he slept so much now, he couldn’t help it — and he woke thick-headed, with the sun beginning to color the sky. He reached for his journal and wrote:

Dr. Kane’s narrative of the First Grinnell Expedition was a boy’s romp, an adventure story — but this new book is so good I can’t bear to look at it. If he and I had become friends, if I’d gone on his expedition rather than Zeke’s; but he didn’t even consider me. Everyone has passed me. Maury’s published his Physical Geography of the Sea, supporting Kane’s findings about the open polar basin. Ringgold’s already written up some of his workfrom the North Pacific Expedition: another expedition that might have included me. He found small shelled animals on the bottom of the Coral Sea, two and a half miles down — a very important discovery, proving that there’s no azoic zone. Noplace where the great weight of water prevents a plumb line from passing, creatures from living. My father used to tell me that, below a certain depth, nothing could sink and drowned bodies and wrecked ships floated far off the bottom in layers related to their weight. That’s what I feel like myself. As if I’m floating below the surface, above the bottom, suspended in fluid as thick as mercury. Why hasn’t Lady Franklin written me back?

AFTER THAT QUARREL, Alexandra avoided him and spent more time with Lavinia. They’d seen each other tired, crabby, partially dressed; sullen, excited, impatient, broken: although Lavinia was difficult to be around these days, Alexandra thought of her as another sister. The sight of Lavinia’s uncoiled hair, matted around her shoulders, pained her. So did the scraps of paper drifting around Lavinia’s bed: letters pleading that people find Zeke’s body, rescue Zeke’s relics, discover new seas in the name of Zeke. None of which would ever be sent. The sight of her brothers made her weep, the doctor annoyed her, and nothing Alexandra said seemed to help. Sitting useless by Lavinia’s bed, Alexandra thought of calling on Browning. Everyone in their neighborhood turned to him; despite a certain humorlessness he had a rare talent for comforting the bereaved and once had soothed a widow who’d locked herself in her attic after losing her children in a skating accident. Berating herself for not thinking of this before, she asked for his help.

For the next few weeks, Browning visited Lavinia frequently, gliding dark-suited up to her room with his Bible and a handful of other books. Although Alexandra wasn’t privy to their conversations she could see how much they helped. Lavinia stopped writing letters and began to come downstairs for a few hours each day; she dressed and ate and took some interest in the workings of the household. What had Browning said? With his guidance she’d begun to pray again, Lavinia revealed. As she had as a girl; it comforted her. When Linnaeus and Humboldt proposed a family Christmas dinner, she agreed.

“I can’t make the arrangements,” she said. “But if Alexandra is willing…”

“Of course,” Alexandra said. “It would be my pleasure.”

“Let’s have both families, then,” Lavinia said. “Ours, and yours — would your brother come, do you think? I would like that.”

Alexandra chose the menu, consulted with the cook, directed the housecleaning and supervised the decorating of the tree. The house was beautiful and no one minded how much she spent. On Christmas day they gathered around the huge mahogany table, with all the leaves inserted and chairs borrowed from every room. Linnaeus and Lucy and their daughter; Humboldt and Ellen and their little son; Alexandra’s sisters, Emily and Jane; Browning and Harriet and Nicholas, who was almost three. Harriet, expecting another child in January, sat in an armchair with a pillow behind her back. Lavinia sat at the foot of the table, presiding over all that Alexandra had arranged. Alexandra sat to her right, where she might remind Lavinia unobtrusively of some forgotten dish or ritual. Far away, at the head of the table, was Erasmus in his wheeled chair. A turkey at one end, a ham at the other; white porcelain dishes of vegetables steaming beneath their covers; relishes and sauces and gravies and condiments; a forest of stemware, a sea of silver.

The candles sparked a confusing network of reflections from the shining surfaces, and during Browning’s long prayer Alexandra saw flames in wine and faces in spoons. “So much has been taken from us,” Browning said. “Yet so much remains.” Then something about thanking the Lord for the bounty before them and the family remaining to them, and a long loop through the Lord’s mysterious ways. How hard it is, Browning said, to accept the accidents that befall us. The ferry exploding on the river, which had taken from him and his sisters their parents; the childbed fever that had taken Mrs. Wells from her children when they were still so young — we have these losses in common, he said. They bind our families. As does this accident in the unknown regions of the north. Zechariah is gone from us, but we are grateful for the return of Erasmus.

Throughout all this, Alexandra saw, Lavinia stared straight ahead. Straight at Erasmus, her right hand tucked in her lap while her left turned a silver spoon back to front, front to back, the reflections melting, reforming, and melting again. When Browning said, “Amen,” Lavinia said softly, “I forgive you.” Everyone knew she was speaking to Erasmus. “I understand that you did your best.”

“I did,” said Erasmus. His end of the table was so far from hers. “I did everything I could.”

There was a precarious moment of silence. Then Nicholas tipped over a dish of pickles, Humboldt’s little William laughed delightedly, Harriet began to scold her son and was stopped by Browning’s quiet hand on hers. Dinner passed, almost festive, everyone chattering while Lavinia and Erasmus regarded each other and Alexandra thought, Have they made up, then? Between them she’d felt pulled so thin that light might shine through her lungs. Perhaps Browning had repeated to Lavinia the words he’d spoken after their own parents’ deaths — how, in a family with no parents, they must each stand as guardians and protectors of one another.

They ate and drank, plates came and went; Lavinia directed the servants convincingly. “I’m so glad you could do this,” Alexandra said. “This is wonderful.”

“You did most of the work,” Lavinia replied. There were gray circles beneath her eyes, and she wasn’t eating. But that she was here at all was a miracle.

Somewhere else, at other Christmas dinners, people were discussing Dr. Kane and his book, the continuing searches for Franklin, the arctic in general: anything to avoid the discussions of politics and slavery that fractured families and friends. But here the topic on which everyone else fell back was also forbidden, and they struggled, and talked about books. Jane and Lucy found common ground in The Wide, Wide World, agreeing that they both still coveted the mahogany desk given to the novel’s heroine in its most famous scene.