Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

He bent toward Erasmus and squinted. “Tell me the truth— did you kill him?”

Was that what people thought? Not just that he had abandoned Zeke, but that he’d murdered him? Erasmus rose but Copernicus pushed him down.

“How dare you!” Copernicus said. “My brother saved that expedition, he’s the one who got everyone safely home. Zeke made his own decisions, what happened to him was his choice and you have no right…”

Godfrey drained his second glass and set it down. “Well, excuse me,” he said to Erasmus. “Excuse me for making assumptions. But, you know — Kane’s account of our voyage is so different from what actually happened… all I know about you is what I’ve read in the papers. How would I know what you really did?”

“I did everything I could,” Erasmus said. “Believe that or not, as you choose.” He rose again, sure that everyone in the tavern was looking at them. “We have to go.”

Godfrey grasped his arm. “Don’t,” he said. “I know you despise me, everyone does — but you and I have things in common.”

More carriages rolled by, a stream of handsome, well-dressed people talking and laughing, making plans, doing whatever it is people do. What did they do? They passed, leaving Erasmus cut off once more from the simple stream of dailiness. He and Godfrey had nothing in common, he thought. Nothing at all.

“I deserve a hearing too,” Godfrey continued. “A fair and impartial hearing before the American public — I’m writing a book, my version. Will you help me? I need money. Surely you among all men can sympathize…”

If he would stop talking; if this awful man would just stop talking… Erasmus dug in his pockets, dropped a few bills on the table, and fled with Copernicus. His dismay stayed with him long after they’d reached home, and that evening he wrote in his journal:

What a horrid man! Yet something in Godfrey's account maizes me wonder if our two voyages were so different. Perhaps I've been making a mistake in comparing what I did with what others claimed in print to have done. Godfrey said Kane's anger was boundless when the eight crew members seceded and set off on their boat journey; and that four months later, Kane was vindictive when the frozen men straggled bacl{ to the ship. According to Godfrey there was no saintly welcome; Kane was an iron-willed tyrant who grudgingly saved his crewmen only when their wills were broken. Godfrey boils with resentment and self-interest; yet some of what he says may be true.

If Kane was less of a hero than we all believe, am I less of a failure? The world l{nows Kane's version of that expedition, not Godfrey's; as it knew Wilkes's version of the Exploring Expedition and no one else's— and as it might have known Zeke's version of our own journey, had he not been lost.

Copernicus says we ought to try to talk with him again, this time without beer; he may have observed things on his side of Smith Sound I never saw, which might contribute to our portrait of the area. But I can't bear to see him again, I can't bear to thinly of anyone drawing a parallel between us. How can I write one word about the arctic when a person such as Godfrey is also writing a book, one that says me, me, me, me me?

COPERNICUS’S FIRST PAINTING grew, it was radiant. When his dealer visited the Repository to collect a group of the western paintings, Copernicus showed him the unfinished picture of Melville Bay and the dealer’s breath whistled in his throat. “It’s one of a set,” Copernicus said. “For a book my brother’s writing.”

“When you finish them,” the dealer said, “after the color plates have been made, if you’d let me sell them as a group…”

“We’ll discuss it later,” Copernicus said. “After the work is done.”

He talked about the book as if it already existed, and so Erasmus wrote on. He took courage not only from his brother but from the presence of Alexandra, who turned out one handsome drawing after another. At night he fell asleep thinking about her face, her hands, the ink on her hands, the way her arms merged pale and strong into the sleeves of her smock. At the back of her neck, beneath the coil of smooth, straight, oak-brown hair, small strands escaped and whispered over the bumps of her vertebrae. He hadn’t found her plain for a long time now.

On the Narwhal sex had been something he seldom thought about, after the first summer; perpetually too cold, too worn, too hungry, so worried he’d barely remembered the feel of skin on skin, which had seemed like something from another life. And before that, when he was still healthy and energetic, the cabin was always full of men coming and going, the light had been endless, there was no privacy. A few times, landing on the shoreline to hunt or left briefly alone on Boothia, he’d touched himself in the shelter of some rocks — but he’d thought of a red-haired woman in Washington then, a woman on Front Street, the flow ery faces of Lavinia’s friends. Now he lay in his lonely bed imagining Alexandra.

Thinking all the heat flowed from him, Erasmus was unaware of Alexandra’s humming confusion. It was the presence of both brothers, she thought, that made her feel so strange. Copernicus’s strong, broad body, his easy good humor and the way he rested his hand on her shoulder; Erasmus’s focused attention, the way he followed her hands and looked into her eyes and spoke as if they were equals: which was it she wanted? Both, perhaps. Although she was aware even then that the affection she felt beaming from Copernicus was part of his general affection for the world. Perhaps it was only the delirious early summer weather that made her toss and turn in her sheets and stare at herself naked in the mirror. One lit candle, the gleam off her flank slipping into the glass and out as she imagined how she might look to another set of eyes. At night someone appeared in her dreams who was neither Erasmus nor Copernicus but both of them. During the day when she wasn’t working she sat with Lavinia and talked about transplanting the irises.

All this made her blush when finally, reluctantly, she spoke to Erasmus about her financial situation. He looked so startled, even ashamed — did he never need to think about money? “I have an income,” he said quickly. “More than I need. It was foolish of me not to realize that Linnaeus and Humboldt had stopped paying you. The three of us are full partners on this project, and it’s only fair you should receive a salary for your efforts.”

IN THE GARDEN the four of them sat, eating strawberry-rhubarb pie and listening to Erasmus read. The bleeding hearts were still in bloom, the weather had been cool; the lawn stretched soft and green between the wicker chairs and the drive. Along the drive the peonies planted so long ago rose in great clumps covered with flowers. Erasmus turned the pages on his lap. Lavinia nodded her head thoughtfully when Erasmus read a passage about the fevered coming of summer to Disko Island. It was a gift, she said. She could almost see the cliffs and ice floes sailing toward her. Even if Erasmus wasn’t writing directly about Zeke, he was letting her see the last things Zeke might have seen, and she was grateful for that. Erasmus read on. A carriage appeared at the end of the drive and a man got out. After that everything happened as if in a dream.

Money changed hands and boxes were dropped onto the grass. Then another, smaller figure stepped down from the carriage, bundled in unfamiliar clothes. The figure lifted out a child; the pair sat, when the man pointed, on one of the boxes. The man began to walk up the drive, between the rows of peonies. Pink globes, creamy globes, the man touching the globes as he passed; Erasmus rose from his chair without his sticks and toppled to the ground. Then Lavinia was running toward the man, stumbling over the hem of her dress, and Copernicus and Alexandra were bending over Erasmus.